I just bought a used “faulty” T430.
It doesn’t turn on at all (no lights, no sounds, no fan spin) and when I tried to turn it on with only the critical components (motherboard, power adapter and speakers), I got the same result.
I’ve also examined the power area on the motherboard, and it seems like 20V is getting delivered to the motherboard just fine.
But I’ve looked at the motherboard thoroughly, and I couldn’t find a single part of it that looked bad.
Is this definitely caused by the motherboard, or could it be an issue with another component like the CPU?
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As far as I know for this on Thinkpad, there’s a problem with your firmware and try to take a boot firmware from another laptop T430. Reflash it, and let’s see if it works. If it not works, then by all mean, there’s something wrong in the CPU. Try to change it, and if its not work again, change the motherboard.
is there a way you know of flashing firmware without the laptop working? Do I need one of those bios programmer clip thingies?
@Jumuta if your laptop doesn’t turn on, external flashing is the only way.
thanks, I’ll try getting a soic8 clip and flashing coreboot with a raspberry pi
@Jumuta try Coreboot from Skulls project
is it better than libreboot in some way?
@Jumuta Skulls just uses SeaBIOS as a payload, so it mush simpler.
However you can still try Libreboot, but you need to dump your firmware and extract binary files from it (like IME for example, and vgablob if you have Nvidia GPU)
I see, I thought there were pre built images for libreboot though?
@Evv1L @Jumuta Incorrect. Libreboot’s build system automatically downloads update files from Lenovo, to extract things like Intel ME, which is then processed through me_cleaner.
Dumping your factory ROM is still recommended, but you don’t need to extract anything from it to build a full Libreboot image.
On Libreboot release ROMs, files like Intel ME are missing but can be added using the same auto-download logic from the build system. See:
https://libreboot.org/docs/install/ivy_has_common.html
We provide SeaBIOS and GRUB.
for anyone looking for info on a similar issue, my issue ended up being that the motherboard was faulty. Flashing skulls didn’t fix it, nor a CPU swap. I had to buy a new motherboard from AliExpress.
