I have a Lenovo W540 which is almost 3 years old and has served me well so far.
2 weeks ago I finally got around to reinstall Ubuntu on it and I went with 15.04 (previously I had an old version on it that was pretty messy after 5 semesters of installing various tools for classes and generally fiddling around with it). I also installed fedora 22 on the side to test it out.
This week I had to install windows 7 for a different class. Had some problem with installing the WLAN drivers (lenovo's driver page is not exactly great) but managed in the end. Windows Update took way too long to do anything so I installed a newer version of the Windows Update program manually. Afterwards it installed ~200 updates in multiple steps which each required a reboot. But it worked in the end. I formatted the Fedora partition to give more space to windows (Visual Studio is huge..)
I then fixed the grub2 entries with the ubuntu live-dvd and it worked, I was able to boot both operating systems without problems. That was yesterday. Today it was working well all day, had some minor problems in the afternoon when unzipping a 8gb zip file partially froze ubuntu and when I tried copying said zip file to a USB stick it got stuck after a while, which turned out to be because the other guy formatted it in FAT which doesn't accept files over 4.3gb... Removing the stick then threw some errors but wasn't obviously affected for another hour or so before I left. Now the troubles started when I got home. Ubuntu was booted but suspended (lid was closed). I opened it and just browsed on Firefox for a bit, then the laptop suddenly restarted by switching off immediately, without any notifications or error messages. I rebooted into ubuntu and after logging in and a few seconds of using ubuntu it crashed again. I rebooted again, now it showed an error message after Grub:
[0.7xxxxxx] ACPI PPC Probe failed.
(I'm not sure about the number in the beginning anymore, but I'm certain it started with 0.7). There was nothing else, just a black screen with that message. I googled around a bit and found that this message is usually accompanied by "Starting version 219" which mine wasn't.
I force-rebooted (5s on the power button) and tried to start boot windows, thinking it was something with ubuntu. Nope, just shows a black screen as well. After a few more reboots and trying combinations of with/without battery and cable, it doesn't even want to show me that message anymore, after choosing an entry in Grub it takes a few seconds and it shuts down immediately. Doesn't matter which Ubuntu entry I choose (upstart, save mode, older kernel version (there are 2 entries)) or if I choose Windows, where it crashes after the "Starting Windows" text. I even tried MemTest86+ but it also crashed after ~2 minutes of testing. I also tried booting from a liveCD (fedora was in reach), but it also crashes pretty much immediately. Some people online (e.g. here ) think that it's related to Nvidia. This might be true because when I set up Windows 7 yesterday, I also installed the newest NVidia drivers. But as said, it worked and I restarted multiple times since.
I guess what I'm asking is.. what can I do to find out what it is/fix it?
The laptop is still covered under warranty but I'm hesitant to call, since I use it daily (IT BSc student) and having to send it in would mean that I can't code in class for 1-2 weeks or more ...
tl;dr
- Lenovo w540 with Ubuntu 15.04/Windows 7 (2 weeks/1 day old)
- showed "[0.7xxxxxx] ACPI PPC Probe failed." error after shutting down while using it
- now immediately shuts down seconds after Grub, no matter which OS/setting
- liveCD doesn't work
- might be nvidia drivers but I can't really do anything about that without accessing any OS...
