Leap of faith here, when was the last time you updated the T21 bios? I use to run one and there were some versions of bios that screwed up ACPI code that could do what you describe. Thus I would try it again at the latest bios, if that does not fix it, well there is always recycling!
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 8:13 AM, John Mort <[email protected]> wrote: > I had a strange thing happen to me this weekend. I have an old thinkpad > t20/t21 frankenstein that I've been forcing to stay alive by canabalizing > parts from other thinpads of the same model over the years. I initially > set it up as an ubuntu server install, but later added GNOME so I could > remote desktop into it. I run the updates on it regularly, but it doesn't > get rebooted very often. > > This weekend I was doing some work in the room it's in and accidentally > unplugged it. Since the battery on it is shot, it went right down. When I > tried rebooting the initial kernel selected in GRUB--called something like > linux-kernel-pae--failed to boot the machine, and it did that kernel panic > thing where the LEDs start blinking together. > > I kept rebooting, working my way down the list of kernels until one got me > back to my desktop. Ran updates again to see if a new kernel was available > and saw that I was up to date, but a number of packages that shared the > name of that first kernel on the list had been held back. So I manually > used apt-get to ull down that package, hoping it would enable that first > kernel on my list to just work and make any future rebooting not need any > manual intervention. > > Instead, when I rebooted, I got that GRUB 1.99 recovery command line that > I never have any success with. So I tried googling and playing with that > command line anyway, and failed as usual, and then checked my notes. In > the past I've booked up with a live CD and used that to fix grub somehow, > but I didn't take good notes on how to do that. So I decided to try that > Boot Repair live CD rather than blowing my whole weekend relearning how to > fix grub. Boot Repair didn't seem to work though, as the display was all > garbled and I couldn't get it to display on an external monitor. > > So I popped in the live CD and the screen refused to come up at all. I > tried this several times but I wasn't even getting the BIOS screen, so I > figured the machine was probably dead. I had an old thinkpad R51, and > swapped the harddrive from my T20/T21 into that to see if I could get > lucky. The computer booted up fine, grub came up the way it should, and > the first kernel in the list--the generic-pae thing--worked perfectly. I > just had to change /etc/network/interfaces from starting eth0 to starting > eth1 and everything seems to work fine. > > So, I thought this was kind of interesting. I didn't really get to do > anything to fix GRUB. Moving the hard drive from one machine to the other > seemed to fix it though. How could failing hardware cause GRUB to boot > into that emergency command line? > > _______________________________________________ > Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org > http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug > > Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College > Jul 10 - Mad Science Fair - Open Hardware Expo > Aug 7 - Scripting Your World with Python > Oct 2 - OpenFlow: Open Standard for Networking Hardware > > -- /** ** Joseph Apuzzo **/
_______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Jul 10 - Mad Science Fair - Open Hardware Expo Aug 7 - Scripting Your World with Python Oct 2 - OpenFlow: Open Standard for Networking Hardware
