Power LED flashes 3 times but T430 won't boot FIXED

[jgperez]

From Google searches, I know this problem applies not only to the T430 but other models; however I have a T430.

The problem is this: the computer seems completely dead. The ONLY sign of any life is that when you connect the power supply, the battery LED on the back of the screen (in other words, on the outside of the computer) flashes three times.

I found that shorting the CMOS battery cleared the problem in my case, I believe because it cleared or reset a corrupted CMOS configuration.

I had searched Google for a solution, and saw reference to a "reset" hole in other ThinkPad models. Usually in electronics (like routers) these clear configuration data that somehow had become corrupted. But the T430 does not have this emergency reset feature. That's where the idea of clearing the CMOS came from. But trying to clear the CMOS wasn't the first thing I tried.

By the time I decided to try this, I had removed the battery, removed the user installable/revovable memory module, disabled wifi with the external switch, removed a mouse dongle and finally removed the wifi card, all without effect. I also followed various recommendations about pressing the power button for 30 seconds connected, or disconnected, with and without the battery installed and so on. There are countless threads when you Google search which showed me this problem was not unique to me, though nowhere did I find a good answer.

I tried disconnecting the CMOS battery which is a button battery in a yellow wrapper located under the same cover in the middle of the back side that gives access to the memory module and wifi card, but could not get it to disconnect easily from where its wires were plugged in. I was nervous about causing permanent damage so examined it with a magnifying glass (I'm old, in my 70's, magnifying glasses have become essential fo me) and I noticed on the back side of this tiny socket were two bare wire leads going into the pc board, so I shorted those for a few seconds with a small screwdriver not really expecting it to work but thought I should try it before using more force to try to disconnect the CMOS battery. And --WOW-- as soon as I plugged the power supply into the still partly-disassembled T430, it gave me a different response on the LED's and then actually booted by itself without pressing the power button to a nag screen about how there was an error with the system time.

I tried bypassing the nag screen: no joy, so fixed the system time in the BIOS, saved te BIOS changes and it booted into Windows. I then shut it down, disconnected the power supply, reinstalled the memory module, wifi card and mouse dongle and then reconnected the power supply.

Again it booted by itself with the nag screen about system time. I fixed that again, saved the BIOS changes and it booted windows normally. I reactivated wifi with the external switch on the right hand of the case, and it worked fine, then plugged in the battery while the computer was running. That worked; the system claimed the battery was 100% charged, so I disconnected the power supply for a minute or two to verify the computer could run from the battery, which it did with no problem.

I've not tried turning it off yet, never mind then removing the battery and unplugging it. Because I suspect my CMOS battery is now dead from my shorting it, and I'm odering a replacement from Amazon. I think the anomaly may have been caused by the CMOS (button) battery needing replacing but some posts on reddit suggest it is related to an issue with hibernate mode.

I don't want to run the risk of corrupting the CMOS configuration again and it'll be just a couple of days before the replacement button battery arrives. So I'm not going to try to figure out exactly how the problem arises.

I have a T430 with 16 gigs of RAM running Windows 11 Pro (23H2), and my hope is this post will assure people with T430 and similar hardware that it is not, at least not necessarily, some catastrophic hardware issue but simply corruption of the CMOS configuration data and the solution is clearing that corrupt data. Especialy because in my Google search results I saw supposed tech support specialists charging people for advice on this problem and then the disappointed comments from some of their clients saying they'd been told it was a hardware problem not worth fixing on such an old computer.