[SOLVED] My T430 stopped working after cleaning it.

[tralph3]

Hi, I have a Thinkpad T430. It was running very hot as of lately, so I decided to clean it up. I had never opened to machine, and I very rarely deal with laptops so I don't have much experience. I removed the keyboard and the palmrest which gave me access to the fan. I didn't disassemble any further as I just wanted to clean the dust off it a bit. I passed a vaccuum and a few sheets of paper and it looked much better. I didn't touch anything else. After assembling it and plugging it in, it didn't boot. The power button lights turned on, along with the microphone and audio mute buttons, but the screen was black. I tried to connect to an external monitor and it didn't display anything. I decided to disassemble it again to take a closer look at what might be wrong. Upon closer inspection, I realized the fan didn't spin when I turned on the machine. My guess is that the computer prevents itself from booting when the fan isn't spinning to not burn itself. But I have no clue on why it doesn't spin. When cleaning, I didn't use any sort of liquid, I didn't break any cables or get anything out of place, I did manually move the fan to be able to clean it completely, but nothing more. I didn't feel ecstatic so I don't think I fried anything with my fingers. The HDD does spin, but I don't see any other reaction from the computer. Please help, I'm shaking, I really really need this conputer.

 

[helpstar]

check all connections again, maybe a ribbon cable was moved out its position a bit

 

[tralph3]

check all connections again, maybe a ribbon cable was moved out its position a bit

I checked everything, the only ribbon cables I touched where the touchpad and keyboard ones, and those are ok, I didn't move or touch any other cable. I forgot to add that I decided to clean up the machine because it suddenly turned off due to overheating, I didn't turn it on again, I just started cleaning right away, could this have something to do with it? I highly doubt something got screwed when it got shutdown, I had many many computers do the same and they never had issues because of it.

 

[firelighter487]

did you try a power cycle? aka remove battery and unplug charger, hold the power button down for 10 seconds, put battery in and plug it in again and then try to boot.

 

[helpstar]

Are you really sure it was overheating and not something else?

unplug the battery and use only the charger
unplug charger and use only the battery

remove the hard drive, does it post then?

unplug RAM and replug, try one single ram in all slots, swap the RAM if more than one is installed.

 

[tralph3]

I tried everything. I tried to do a power cycle, nothing, I tried to use a single stick of ram, nothing, I tried every combination of the sticks positions, nothing, I tried to remove the hard drive, nothing, I tried to remove the ram altogether, nothing. The only thing I'm missing is the CMOS battery, I can't unplug the connector, it's too tight. This machine can't be broken, it was working perfectly fine before and it only had some overheating issues in the past month, that's why I decided to clean it up. I can't think of any logical reason as to why it might break out of the blue. There's no smoke, no burn smell, no black spots on the motherboard, nothing, everything seems to be in perfect condition, but it won't boot no matter what I do. It didn't even beep when it had no ram, I honestly need this computer and can't buy anything else, it can't just die here, please if you have any suggestion give it.

 

[tralph3]

Oh, by the way, since this post didn't have any kind of closure. The motherboard did get fried... somehow. I had to replace it, so that was the issue. Well, at least I got a slightly better CPU in the process. The repair shop must have confused them, and I went from an i5 3210m to an i5 3320m,