T61p - Slow boot up after BIOS update

[Firehawk]

Hi everyone,

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction as I am not sure what the problem is.

I have recently downloaded all the latest drivers etc from Lenovo and did a clean install on Vista Ultimate 64bit.

All seemed to be great until I took out my ultra-bay CD/DVD drive and put my 2nd HDD back in the ultra-bay.

When I power-on the screen displays the usual Thinkpad banner and the BIOS loads, then the screen goes blank with a backlight glow and it takes about a 1min on the blank screen before the cursor flash in top left hand corner comes on which means the OS is now loading and the Vista load bar comes up.

If I put my CD/DVD back in the bay it boots up much quicker without that 1 min of blank screen.

I can only think the system is trying to find the CD/DVD drive, but it should not hang at this point??

I have tried changing the boot order, playing with some settings in the BIOS but no joy, please help.

System spec's are:

T61p - 6457 - 5KU

Nvidia Quadro FX 570M

4Gb RAM

1Gb Turbo Memory

Oh, how does one find out the board serial number as I am concerned that I need to get my Thinkpad planar replaced?

Thanks

[Centex]

The 2nd HDD that you put in the ultra-bay....... does it have a select light/activity light that you can see if you watch the side of the machine? If so, see if you see any activity while the blank-screen delay is underway.

I would suspect some kind of I/O error recovery is underway during the mystery delay.

Centex

[Firehawk]

Thanks for the response.

When I power up, the system checks the devices, it senses the ultra-bay HDD and the main HDD, but then no activity.

Blank screen with the black light for about a 1min.

Wondering if its not the Intel Matrix Storage counsole, I downloaded and installed the drivers from the Intel web site.

Got version Matrix Strorage v: 8.6.0.1007 and Intel Turbo Memory v: 1.8.0.1018 installed.

Then again problem occures pre-boot...

[leeinalex]

firehawk, did you ever find the answer to your problem?

i do not have a T series, but i have a very similar problem, which i felt was related to the graphics driver:

http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=ideaPad&thread.id=10520

after installing xp, i loaded the drivers one-by-one.  first the chipset, and reboot was fine.  after i loaded the nvidia graphics driver, however, i started having the black screen stall problem.  i am not able to install IMSM at all.

[awallalm]

did you ever find a solution to the boot problem?

i have the same issue.

[Firehawk]

Hi there,

Yes I solved the problem after Tech support was generally unhelpfull.

The issue is around the Intel Turbo memory.

I cleaned installed Vista again and all working like a dream, once I install the latest Intel Turbo memory driver it hangs the machine on boot if I have another HDD in the ultra-bay.

There is some issue with the latest BIOS and the Intel Turbo memory driver and using the ultra-bay for the 2nd HDD.

So the only solution was to clean install Vista (again) as once the Turbo memory driver is loaded it puts some code in the boot sector, which causes the problem.

I have taken out my Intel Turbo memory card (which is a genuine Intel card) as Lenovo Tech Support don't consider it a Lenovo part since I did not buy it from them and they refuse to help or progress this case.

Hope this helps.

[awallalm]

thanks

i had about the same issue with tech support

im going to try the old turbo mem driver

[wilarico]

How did you make out with changing the driver?  Has anyone tried reverting the BIOS to the previous version, if that is even possible? I have the same issue with WIN 7 x64