Episode: 3849
Title: HPR3849: trouble shooting
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3849/hpr3849.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:38:36

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3849 for Thursday the 4th of May 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Trouble Shooting.
It is hosted by Brian in Ohio and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is don't overlook the obvious.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, Brian in Ohio.
I'm out from under my rock, I've got to show here on a random topic shortly after doing
the episode on how a Slackware and EFI booting that T480 that I spoke so fondly of decided
not to boot and ended up in an interesting situation so I wanted to talk a little bit about
my troubleshooting and the good news is that the computer is up and running and it didn't
cost me a dime.
What happened was I was on the road and I turned the computer on and I ended up in Slack
where when you turn the computer on you get all the kernel messages.
Those aren't blanked out.
I think a lot of distributions don't show those but so you'll see a scrolling of text
go by and I didn't grab a shot of this I should have but I didn't think about it until
after the fact but I do have some images in the show notes and sort of one of them is
what those kernel messages look like if you've never seen them before because of the distribution
you're using.
Anyway, what came up was a kernel panic, the started scrolling through the messages and
at the very end the last thing it said was kernel panic which means it can't find, I think
that just means the kernel can't find stuff or the current can't find itself.
Anyway, it couldn't complete the boot process basically and you end up with the machine
that's in a dead state.
I looked at some of those messages and towards the top of those it started talking about
being unable to find or spawn some RAM disks that it uses.
Anyway, which kind of set me down thinking that maybe this is a RAM problem.
This computer that when I bought it came with 8 gigabytes of RAM and it's able to go
up to 32 gigabytes so I've always wanted to upgrade it anyway.
So I figured that maybe the RAM died or something.
So I was able to boot into the BIOS and there's some diagnostic tests there but I never
trust any of those things and it said the RAM was fine and so I tried some different booting
options.
I pulled out a U.S. live version of Slackware, stuck it in the U.S.B. and tried to boot
it that way.
Same results, it wouldn't boot at all and then finally it quit to give me the kernel
messages and it would go basically straight to a some kind of BIOS message where it asked
which what do you want to boot into Slackware or Windows and when you press that it would
just return, keep doing that over and over again.
So I figured it was time to crack this guy open and see maybe if there's something wrong
and my biggest concern was that the NVMe drive had failed and I was thinking that would
be a drag because that's probably a lot more money than some RAM.
So what I ended up doing was nice thing about the T480 is that it's a pretty user friendly
as far as opening it up.
You take out the external battery, you unscrew six screws and they're actually captive
screws so you can't lose them like you used to do in the good old days.
And then you just pry open the back just a plastic bottom, pry that guy open and you see
the whole internals of the computer, the bottom of the motherboard.
Maybe it's the top of the motherboard, I don't know how it depends on your perspective.
Anyway, a couple things I checked was because at the very last time I booted into the BIOS,
the date was dead and I thought, well maybe this is the battery, the CMOS battery and
so that was easy to find, that's a little yellow underneath a little bit of tape and I pulled
it off and did the small fastener and I checked the voltage and it came up at three volts
so I figured that was probably not a problem, something that corrupted the date.
And so then I looked at the RAM and I pulled the RAM out and just to see how it would boot
without any RAM at all and of course it didn't put it back, this is all, put the back
back on, put the battery back in, turn it over, turn it on, see if it works, doesn't work
kind of typical, takes a little more time to do the shuffle and do the actual test.
It didn't happen there so then I thought, well I'll order some RAM, I got, so I ended
up doubling, I had 16 gigabytes of RAM, I made sure it was the right type and everything
and Amazon is, I don't, it's a love-hate relationship, I don't love them but they certainly
do ship stuff quick and the next day I had some RAM and through that in there, same results,
nothing, same, wouldn't boot and which was disappointing because I just spent some money
on some RAM and I thought maybe this computer was dead or at least the NVME drive had died.
Well it was time to look at that and again open up the back of it, the NVME drive is very
easily to access, it's in a case, it looks like a, I'm not sure, I believe you can put
a regular SSD drive in it because it looks like the same housing and then this NVME drive
is inside this foe, you know, it takes up the space, it's an adapter, that's what I'm
looking for, it's an adapter for the NVME drive to fit it in that SSD slot.
So I popped that guy out and it has a, a, a clasp, I've got a picture, another image
in the show notes, it's got a, a little tiny connector with a little, a little metal arm
that goes over the top to hold it in place and so you have to flip that guy up and pull
it out and somebody had put a magic marker mark on it to make sure it goes in the right
way again which was very helpful and a good thought in the future.
So I pulled that guy out and I pulled the SSD NVME drive out and then I tried booting
it without the NVME drive at all and I actually tried booting it with a live disc with the
new RAM and it still would not boot, it was very strange, I could not get that thing to
boot with even with, I guess it just didn't, didn't like the fact that it couldn't get past
that test of the BIOS probably of having no drive at all.
And then so I kind of put it back and forth and try to see if the connector was loose,
tried that a couple of times and then I, after about the third time of trying different
things, I looked at that NVME drive and it wouldn't be hold, it had the same kind of,
so it had one connector onto the motherboard that, one with the little lever on it and
the magic marker mark and then there was actually another one, I didn't have looked at
this earlier close enough and there was another one of those same kind of connectors but
it had, it was bumped off, it was, I could tell that it was just maybe half way plugged
in and so this connector was on the actual NVME or on that adapter board so I pushed it
in, clapped it down and the computer booted right up.
So the moral of the story is, I guess the thing I learned, moral of the story, that's
funny. The things I learned are one, backup your data, two, have a computer that you
can work on as opposed to one of these ones where everything is soldered in and unfixable
by you or without ease, and three, don't overlook the obvious. I think Clot 2 when he talks
about, he mentions this usually when he talks about audio troubles, he always says to,
you know, he would tell whoever, he would check himself, make sure that your microphone
is plugged in and so look at both ends of it, when there's a connector, follow that cable
down to wherever it goes to and maybe there's another connector on the other end and I think
this is something that I've, a trap that I've fallen into many times, you sort of get laser
focused on certain things and you look and things are that's fine, there's nothing no problem
here but you overlook the obvious because maybe you're in a rush or maybe you're just,
you've put your mind into a certain mindset and are not looking at, so take a step back,
have a cup of coffee, look at the thing, think about both ends of cables, there might
be two plug-ins type of thing and you might be able to fix your computer without spending
any money which is where I ended up and that's great, so I just wanted to pass that little
bit of troubleshooting learning on to anybody else out there who might be facing a task
that they, and want to try to fix something, just don't overlook, don't overlook the
obvious, take your time and really look things over, especially both ends of cables, so that's
it, thanks for listening, hope you learned something and I guess I'll remind everybody
that haste makes waste, bye bye.
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