[PLUG] Ancient Thinkpad T61 BIOS

John Jason Jordan johnxj at gmx.com
Tue Jun 23 17:14:54 UTC 2020


On Tue, 23 Jun 2020 01:10:04 -0400
tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com dijo:

>Can you find some error messages from previous boot by sudo journalctl?
>
>If not - try older distro - say 16.04 - if that is stable - perhaps it
>is not related to your BIOS work. if that helps - would 18.4 run
>without crashes?
>
>It kind of feels like graphics driver issue rather than SATA - it
>would probably crash during boot.
>
>Try disabling GUI all effects, later HW acceleration.
>
>Can you re-flash Thinkpad BIOS to see if that resolves it?

Thanks for the suggestions. I may have solved the problem, but it will
take a long time working with it to see if it no longer hangs.

My first suspect was the BIOS flash, but my second guess was video, and
video struck me as easier to fix, so that's where I started. The macine
has an Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M, which was using the nouveau driver.
Online I found lots of complaints about this setup - not the full
resolution and not using all the RAM on the chip. So I installed the
Nvidia driver from the repos (not easy to figure out which one to
install!), and after rebooting I saw the Nvidia logo flash by, and so
far it is still running. Crossing fingers. Oh, and windows seem to be
redrawing faster, although the resolution is still 1680x1050. W'll see.



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