I have a friend's Thinkpad I Series that won't boot at all. Here are a few things that I do know that's wrong and what it is doing. First off, the battery is dead so I have to use the AC adapter. When I turn it on, the IBM Thinpad logo comes on the screen(well at least did a few times at first, now the screen is completely blank when I try to start it), it does nothing from there besides make some short bursts of grinding type noises. It does 2 sets of 4, then 5 and keeps on doing that. I did happen to be fortunate enough several times when I hit the F2 key during attempted startups and got into the startup configuration. Memory test was disabled and boot from a cd was enabled. I enabled the memory test and when I saved the settings, it tried to restart and I got a message saying the memory was good, but the CMOS battery was bad. I attempted to boot from a bootable CD which has it's own operating system on it, but it won't even boot from it. Would the CMOS battery being bad be causing all the trouble, or do you think it's the motherboard altogether? I appreciate any insight, thanks.