Thinkpad Laptop wont boot; stuck in a pre-bootup loop

[Kabump]

Hi all. I have a problem with my laptop. I have a Thinkpad T440p that is stuck in what appears to be a pre-BIOS loop. It starts up, the keys light up like its going to boot, then a click is heard and the key lights shut off and the process starts again. This loop is approximately 1-1.5 second per cycle, and the only way to stop it is to pull out the battery. I have posted a video of the loop here.

Now, how I arrived at this point and what I know. I had to take out the hard drive that was in there to attempt to boot another hard drive that wasn't playing nice into a USB linux environment. It didn't work. When I attempted to put back in the original hard drive, it does the loop you see now. Trying with another blank SSD, I still get the same loop, which leads me to believe it is an issue with the laptop. With the SSD that was originally in the laptop, I have placed it into an internal - to - external USB housing, and the contents of the drive are readable, so my thoughts are once again pointing into the direction of something with the laptop itself preventing this from booting, as opposed to the hard drive.

Does anyone have an idea of what is going on? I tried searching for this issue with other ThinkPads, but I wonder if I was looking to narrowly as I have found nothing. I will continue my search, just wanted to post this here to see if anyone had any ideas or had experience this problem before. Thanks, and if you need any more information, just let me know!

 

[hang-the-9]

The click sound if not coming from the hard drive, points to a motherboard issue. Have you tried to start it without the battery? Try different RAM?

 

[Kabump]

The click sound if not coming from the hard drive, points to a motherboard issue. Have you tried to start it without the battery? Try different RAM?

I had not tried these steps. I didn't think it was the RAM, as this was an immediate situation that happened. By that I mean I was using the laptop, switch out the hard drives, and when I put the original back in, it was doing this. It hadn't occured to me to try that, as it wasn't something I thought would be the issue. I'll dig up some RAM and give that a shot.

 

[hang-the-9]

Try resetting the BIOS to defaults if you can boot it that far. The SATA port may have been damaged when you swapped drives. A bad drive can cause damage to the port, or maybe it just got damaged when you were inserting it.

 

[Kabump]

Swapping in new RAM worked. I am confused as to how the RAM got damaged in this situation, but that was indeed the problem. Thanks for your help!

 

[hang-the-9]

Swapping in new RAM worked. I am confused as to how the RAM got damaged in this situation, but that was indeed the problem. Thanks for your help!

How hardware fails is often a mystery unless you start analyzing things under a microscope and monitor all voltage and temperature changes in the computer. You don't need to have something visible happen like a truck running over the computer or have it stuck by lightning to damage a component.

 

[Aravind_5]

Hi,
I have a similar problem with my thinkpad t430s. The lap was working fine, but after not being used for a week, the lap doesn't boot up. When I press the power button, the keyboard lights and the fan run for a second and then it stops. After clearing the flea power and checking the components, it doesn't boot up. If I get lucky, it boots up and I ran the diagnostics and found nothing wrong. When I put the laptop in sleep, it wakes up fine. But, if I shut it down, it doesn't boot up.
No beep sound.

Thanks