Lexington Computer Repair Blog

There are a lot of reasons (apparently) that Windows 7 might not resume from standby. Here is a fix to try but probably only if you are desperate and have these exact symptoms.

My customer brought in a Lenovo X200 laptop, a very nice laptop indeed, that would not boot. In fact after turning on the computer, the dash lights would like but the display would not even flicker, it was completely dead. If it weren’t for the fact that the computer wasn’t booting (and the customer insisted it had not been immersed in water) I would have thought the display had gone bad. However, I knew it wasn’t just a display problem because if it had been a) the machine would have continued to boot and b) we would have been able to see something by connecting an external monitor.

Interestingly, if I removed all the RAM, the machine would provide the beep codes associated with, “Hey stupid, you’ve removed all the RAM”. Replacing one stick at a time did not fix the problem, replace the HDD did not fix the problem. The machine does not have an internal CD, but if it did, replacing it would not have helped.

So, here is a summary of the symptoms:

• Black screen, no flicker or change in state
• Dash lights light but HDD light does not show sustained activity
• Bluetooth light illuminates and stays lit
• No POST
• No BIOS screen
• No beep codes (unless all RAM is removed)
• Same result with battery in and out

This looked like a dead system board and that’s what the repair manual indicated as well. But as it turns out, it was just a hosed CMOS. On this particular machine, the only way to reset the CMOS (that I could find) was to partly disassemble the computer, unplug the CMOS battery then put everything back together. Many machines have a simpler method that can be done using the power button (that did not work on this machine) or some other key combination. If you have a different machine, Google for “CMOS reset” and the model of your computer and you should find a way to do this.

Well, I’ve had my first Windows 7 problem. I did a clean install “upgrade” of a machine to Windows 7 Home Premium, tested the machine and turned it back over to the customer. He called me two days later when he experienced the infamous (Vista) KSOD. He described the symptom this way: the machine was working fine the night before, but when he turned it on in the morning, it came up with the BIOS screen then went straight to a black screen with a blinking cursor. Yikes, I thought, this is too close to Vista for my tastes.

The machine is a Toshiba Qosmio A45-411 laptop. I’m not actually positive that this is strictly a Windows 7 problem. It turns out that the issue has to do with the computer not finding the hard drive after it wakes up from hibernation. To fix the immediate problem, I removed the hard drive from the machine and turned it on. With no hard drive it the machine, it tries to boot from the network (for some reason it skips over the CD drive which is first on the list). After the unsuccessful network boot, I turned off the computer and re-inserted the hard drive. Hit the power switch and it will again try to boot from the network, then, after a moment, will successfully resume using the HDD.

This particular computer had some problems with SATA LPM (Linked Power Mode) which were supposed to be fixed with a BIOS update. I have a suspicion that this is where the problem lies but I don’t have the time right now to fully sort this. My workaround for the problem is to disable hibernation on this machine as the customer is OK with that. You can read about how to disable hibernation in Windows 7 here. If you use the GUI method Brink describes here, there is a setting for disk power that might be interesting to fool with if you have the time.

EDIT: I’ve added another simple solution for the blinking cursor problem that is not Windows 7 specific.