AC Power = fine; Battery Power => reboot / freeze on T41

SpiderPigLoki · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Aug 2008 Posts: 90

Hi there.

As you (hopefully) can reead from the title, I got a problem with my battery.

When I run the Laptop with AC Power it just boots fine, but when I want to run it from battery it loads Grub, loads the kernel, but during loading it, it freezes for a few seconds and then reboots, loads grubs, starts to load the kernel, etc. etc.

The last thing the kernel alsways says is

Abraxas · l33t Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 814

Tha'ts weird that it only happens on battery. Are you using cpufreq? I had major issues with the conservative governor. It hard locked my laptop consistently. I would also take a look at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki. There are a lot of tips and tricks to get your thinkpad working correctly under Linux. I seem to recall an article posted to ThinkWiki discussing some issues with T4* disks and how to resolve the issues. As for ATA/IDE you have both in your T41. ATA refers to the a standard of which IDE drives confrom to. IDE drives are Parellel ATA as apposed to Serial ATA.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2008 9:28 am Post subject:

Post the results of lspci -n and cat /proc/cpuinfo as well as your /etc/fstab file and your complete .config. I'll take a look and see if there's anything suspicious. From an initial look, it could be a power supply problem or a battery problem. However, I'll make sure there's nothing flaky in your .config causing this.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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SpiderPigLoki · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Aug 2008 Posts: 90

Well THX for the two awnsers

Abraxas · l33t Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 814

The options are all in caps so you should "grep CPU". When you do you'll notice that you are using cpu frequency scaling. You also have the conservative governor set in the config. You may or may not be using it though depending on your userspace setup. As for ATA it doesn't look like you have PIIX ATA support activated which should be necessary for your machine. I would start there.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2008 10:15 pm Post subject:

I was looking for the cpu type with the command cat /proc/cpuinfo. But no matter. As long as it was initially correct, it will still be.

I did notice a few things that made me suspicious, so I turned them off, most specifically, the thinkpad module. This could be the cause of the problem, so you might want to do a bit of experimentation after the fact.

Click here for your new .config. Compile as is and see if the trouble goes away. If so, then you got lucky. If not, try using windoze (if installed) and see if the same problem arises. If so, then it's time to go to the shop.

You will have to change your fstab around to match the libata drivers, or change things back to using the ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL drivers ONLY. I'd recommend making the change from hd(x) to sd(x) as DMA support is set up by default. If you need help or guidance, let me know via private message.

When you get the system to boot, please post /var/log/dmesg so I can see how things loaded.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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Abraxas · l33t Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 814

I use the thinkpad-acpi module without issue so I don't think that is a problem. It seems you are using experimental PATA drivers instead of the standard ATA drivers. Also you are using the SFF ATA module but did not specify chipset support. I would turn off the SATA/Experimental drivers and instead use the standard ATA/ATAPI drivers. The proper driver for your machine should be the Intel PIIX/ICH chipset driver. I also noticed some P4 options in your config while I believe that all T4* series laptops use Pentium M.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2008 10:31 am Post subject:

All the more reason to post the result of cat /proc/cpuinfo.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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SpiderPigLoki · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Aug 2008 Posts: 90

Sorry, that I didn't write you earlier, but I was very busy

Thanks for the great ideas and for the config, but that didn't help.
I also installed Debian on it, with the same results... right now I'm running a badblock-test on the TP and see how that is going to end up.
After that I'm going to install Windows on it and we'll see.

Once again THX for the great support and wish me luck.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2008 7:27 pm Post subject:

Good luck. If it's doing the same thing with Debian, then you know it's a hardware issue, but yes, due diligence would dictate the need for Windoze as a means of troubleshooting. Wow, it's actually good for something. :lol:

Blessed be!
Pappy
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Caleb9 · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2009 3:53 pm Post subject:

I have similar problem - after upgrading from gentoo-sources-2.6.26-r4 to 2.6.27-r7 laptop (Asus F3M) doesn't boot up on battery. It works fine with the 2.6.26 kernel so it's surely a software related issue. Let me know which logs/confs to post if you think you can have an idea on what's the prob.

Caleb9 · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2009 4:39 pm Post subject:

Managed to solve in my case by adding ACPI_SBS to kernel.