Thinkpads Forum

Two t60s that I've been refurbishing have exhibited this symptom. I'm wondering if it's something that can be fixed, or if this is motherboard fault?

Sometimes the laptop behaves normally. Other times, when trying to turn it on or restart it, it stays on the boot screen (with the Thinkpad logo) forever. If I press F12 and select a boot device, it boots normally.

Things that have not worked:
Putting the hard drive first in boot order.
Removing the optical drive

Things I haven't tried yet:
Using a different hard drive
Removing the recovery partition from the hard drive

Sometimes defective USB ports can cause this behavior. Are all three external ports functioning normally?

Before you plug smth in the ports to test if they work,
may want to optically inspect them whether the 4 metal tongues are all well aligned,
if not the plug could bend them further and in worst case shorten the 5V rail.

What's the battery condition ?

Sounds like a boot drive issue...I would try a different SSD or boot drive.

After far too long of not having the time/energy to look at the problem, today I dug out the problematic laptop again.

After confirming that all USB ports worked, and that the "getting stuck on Lenovo splash screen" problem appeared regardless of whether or not there was a battery installed, I noticed that it started up nicely once I pressed a key on the keyboard. "That can't be it," I thought, and swapped the keyboard.

Problem solved.

There was something wrong with the keyboard that prevented the system from booting properly without a key being pressed. I suspect the other system that I thought was having the same problem is actually due to the same problematic keyboard.

Older T60's.... is the BIOS battery fresh? May be "just" holding the settings, sorta, kinda....