Good day folks. I'm in pretty deep doo-doos here because I might've busted the keyboard section of this Lenovo T410 laptop. Let me explain: I got it with a fan error, so I took it apart and sure enough it was clogged with dust, so I cleaned it, put it back together, it started up and booted just fine, everything was just fine and dandy until I discovered that part of the keyboard is no longer working, namely the area on the left like CAPS, S, Q, C and so on. I thought maybe it wasn't connected properly, so I took the keyboard off one more time and that is when I saw a hole in the middle of the ribbon cable ! A screw had poked through it
It's because of the idiotic design which has the screw hole right next to the damn ribbon....why's it made like that ?! If you put the keyboard back on and the ribbon flexes just slightly, it goes right over the hole and that screw IS going straight through it !
Realising there's nothing I could do at this point, I ordered a second hand keyboard (new ones being ridiculously expensive) and guess what.....it doesn't work either! So now I have two keyboards that don't work and a laptop which has no keyboard...great.
Trouble is I fear the problem may be with the board and not the keyboard. The screw may have damaged something electronically because the keyboard I got looks decent enough (albeit slightly bowed) and was advertised as working, but it seems to fail in roughly the same area. I distinctly remember the S key not working on either of them for instance. I now ordered ANOTHER one, but this got me thinking that I might've busted the motherboard instead and I'm just wasting money at this point
I'm not a laptop expert by any means, but I managed to get the schematic for this laptop HERE and had a look at the keyboard connector to at least try to get an idea of what might've gone wrong there....it's a bit too complex for me to follow so this is where perhaps some laptop mavericks could help me. Have a look on page 66 where the connector is and try to determine whether shorting something there may cause this behavior or "kill" part of the keyboard. Some wires go to page 64 straight into IC H8S2112(1/2). There are also various voltage busses like 3.3v and 5v present on that connector, so if the screw sent those somewhere they shouldn't be we can definitely get issues...I'm not sure how the keyboard even operates: does it have its own IC or are they just buttons that are read as on/off by that IC ?
The two mouse buttons that are part of the keyboard don't work either, but the little red trackball thingy in the middle DOES work and so do other keys....it's just this one side that's failing. I'm not getting any "stuck" keys either, like a character that's typing continuously or anything. If I'm lucky I just got a bad keyboard and this next one will work, but if that's not it, I fear for the worst....cheers and thanks.

Realising there's nothing I could do at this point, I ordered a second hand keyboard (new ones being ridiculously expensive) and guess what.....it doesn't work either! So now I have two keyboards that don't work and a laptop which has no keyboard...great.
Trouble is I fear the problem may be with the board and not the keyboard. The screw may have damaged something electronically because the keyboard I got looks decent enough (albeit slightly bowed) and was advertised as working, but it seems to fail in roughly the same area. I distinctly remember the S key not working on either of them for instance. I now ordered ANOTHER one, but this got me thinking that I might've busted the motherboard instead and I'm just wasting money at this point
I'm not a laptop expert by any means, but I managed to get the schematic for this laptop HERE and had a look at the keyboard connector to at least try to get an idea of what might've gone wrong there....it's a bit too complex for me to follow so this is where perhaps some laptop mavericks could help me. Have a look on page 66 where the connector is and try to determine whether shorting something there may cause this behavior or "kill" part of the keyboard. Some wires go to page 64 straight into IC H8S2112(1/2). There are also various voltage busses like 3.3v and 5v present on that connector, so if the screw sent those somewhere they shouldn't be we can definitely get issues...I'm not sure how the keyboard even operates: does it have its own IC or are they just buttons that are read as on/off by that IC ?
The two mouse buttons that are part of the keyboard don't work either, but the little red trackball thingy in the middle DOES work and so do other keys....it's just this one side that's failing. I'm not getting any "stuck" keys either, like a character that's typing continuously or anything. If I'm lucky I just got a bad keyboard and this next one will work, but if that's not it, I fear for the worst....cheers and thanks.
Comment