x2100 BIOS guide or at least text version of full menus and options tree?

[greatzot]

Anyone know where to find a guide to the x2100 bios or a text printout of all the bios menu items and options? Would be nice to see everything available at once instead of having to click into one item at a time, so I can figure out how to find my way around this thing and what all the options do.

[atagunov]

Oh wow, Tokyo, Japan X2100 have spread quite a bit! How's yours working? Which screen have you got? Who assembled yours? Did you take the plunge to do BIOS upgrades yet or did you choose to play it safe and leave on whichever BIOS it was?

Re guide, I haven't seen one yet. I suppose we could try to collectively write such a guide, we'd need some wiki for that.. but then I normally try not to go into BIOS unless I have to

[greatzot]

Oh wow, Tokyo, Japan X2100 have spread quite a bit! How's yours working? Which screen have you got? Who assembled yours? Did you take the plunge to do BIOS upgrades yet or did you choose to play it safe and leave on whichever BIOS it was?

Re guide, I haven't seen one yet. I suppose we could try to collectively write such a guide, we'd need some wiki for that.. but then I normally try not to go into BIOS unless I have to

I played it safe and did NOT flash the bios. But unfortunately, as of last night, mine is not working AT ALL. Nothing but the power light turns on--not even the fan. Xue Yao assembled it for me, except the RAM, batteries, and SSDs, which I added myself. I'm waiting to hear back from him about what to do about the fact that it won't even power on any more.

No clue what exactly went wrong but maybe there was some defect in the board from the beginning, as I had trouble getting anything to install including Win10, whereas the other couple of people I've talked to did not have any such trouble, and one was even able to get Win7 installed, while in my case the Win7 installer wouldn't even fully boot. I couldn't get Win10 installer to boot initially but later did, but then it crashed last weekend and wouldn't boot again, whether via auto repair, recovery disk, or the installer disk, until finally dying last night. Not what I hoped for on my first foray into mods, but sometimes you just get lucky.

[atagunov]

Pretty darn sad. No life even after waiting a few minutes after trying to switch on?

Mine sits motionless for about a minute - because I still haven't put that CMOS battery in.
Think it might be the regular behaviour to sit with no signs of life for a minute and then wake up if the CMOS battery is removed from an X2100.

Guess the regular procedure for normal computers is to strip all removable parts: large battery out, ssd out, wifi card out.
You may try to reach the same state as my machine: also remove CMOS battery, unplug charger, hold power button for 10 sec, try booting - still without either of the batteries.
On my X2100 this will result in no signs of life for 1 minute and then garbage on screen then the white on black message that there is no boot device.

We've heard from another forum member with X2100 that some unknown damage to Intel ME can result in extra 10sec delay on booting as the machine keeps "re-training RAM" whatever that means.

On machines other than X2100 you also remove the RAM and wait to hear the beeps, haven't tried that on X2100.
But you could certainly try to remove one of the two RAM sticks, try booting, move the remaining RAM stick to other slot, try booting, try the same with the other RAM stick..

Of course it's not a good sign that you have never been able to install any OS, not even once. It can very well be there is something wrong in a major way with the machine. I was able to install Ubuntu without problems even without that CMOS batt and with these 1 minute waits on startup. My machine is from XY as well, I also purchased RAM, SSD and WiFi card from him. I only procured the batteries myself - and I'm having trouble with battery charge level reporting in Ubuntu which I hope to resolve by updating BIOS, it's a KingSener non-original batt btw. So the above procedure with stripping components is an attempt to isolate failure - what if it's not the motherboard, what if it's one of the add-on components?..

There are miniature boards that you can connect to USB with a display for two digits that are supposed to tell you which state the booting process on a computer has reached to. The idea seems to be that BIOS or some other part of hardware communicates with the board over USB in the process of booting up. I might have one laying around but I haven't yet tried it any of my machines.. Maybe I should get it out at some point and see if it displays anything at all on any of my Thinkpads..

[greatzot]

Before the crash/freeze, the computer would start up immediately. I tried with and without the CMOS battery so that has nothing to do with it. I don't know exactly how long I waited at max, but at least 30 seconds, maybe a minute, maybe two. Don't think there's any point in waiting longer.

I did get Win10 installed, but not immediately when I received the machine, and in the end only got a couple weeks of use out of it before this happened. I told Xue about my earlier troubles but once I got it to work I assumed it was just something about the USB boot drive I used that confused Windows. Now I'm not so sure about that--unlike another user here, I could not get any other system installed--not Win7 or the Linux distros I tried. I also got various errors with some Linux-based backup/recovery software I ran on boot, but before the crash, some of them would work even if the boot process was messy or didn't always finish. After, not a single one would boot. But maybe the trouble I had beforehand was indicative of a hardware problem that already existed and just took some time to completely fail.

I haven't gotten an email back from Xue Yao yet, so maybe I'll have to call him, but I really don't want to go on a wild goose chase of taking the whole thing apart and still getting nowhere. If it's a defective board the solution seems to me to send it back. But not sure how he usually goes about determining that.

[atagunov]

I haven't gotten an email back from Xue Yao yet, so maybe I'll have to call him

Ah, so there is a phone number to call
Well in my case I always used internal reddit messages, he's https://www.reddit.com/user/xueyao

I really don't want to go on a wild goose chase of taking the whole thing apart and still getting nowhere

I think you should be able to play with RAM in the slots and remove the SSD without really taking the whole thing apart. WiFi seems a bit more problematic yes.

I tried with and without the CMOS battery

...and you did the dance with also removing the main batt and disconnecting power supply cable and pressing power button for 10 sec to make sure that memory is truly rest? I guess you did..

Overall not a nice place to be in. I'm certainly sorry to hear about the trouble. Please keep us posted on how the story unfolds.

[greatzot]

Well, Xue Yao got back to me and it sounds like it's probably a bad board. Good news is he has some spares saved just for this sort of situation. Anyway gonna do one last ditch attempt and if it doesn't turn on, send it back.