Service Forum

[goupe]

Dear ALLservice,

Thank you very much for the detailed explanations on unlocking my IBM T41.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get the eeprom reader to work with the kit I assembled, despite many tries with the soldering iron.

Finally, I wrote off the HDD (had backed-up data anyway) disconnected the Lithium Backup Battery, which shunted to HDD lock on the original HDD and then replaced the HDD. This worked and I was able to install WinXP.

But somewhat foolishly, having assembled the unlock kit, I thought I should try one more time to at least get an output from the reader, instead of quitting at "ERROR: Eeprom not available! ".

Well, despite it being hard to do, I think I may have fried the AMTEL chip, because now all that happens at startup is the Power indicator comes and stays on, HDD & NumLock lights flash and the notebook beeps once, then 2 sets of 3 beeps and then one last beep before staying in a zombie state.

Nothing on the display and no sounds (although the cooling fan is turning).

Do you think that this is AMTEL chip failure? Can I solder a new one in place and where does one buy such a chip?

Thanking you in advance...

[victor]

No, is not the atmel.

You should check the SDA and SCL pins and remove any solder bridge, the sympthom is like usually when the SMbus is shorted (SDA with SCL).

It's also possible, that you shorted the Vcc 3.3V (eeprom pin with the GND, if you mounted the 2 wires at the wrong side of the eeprom. Then one of the power mosfets could be the fried..
_________________
Victor Voinea
ALLservice HQ, Romania.