Excessive heat on Lenovo Thinkpad E450 even with CPU @ 100% idle

Rock said:
Ok. But after bios in lenovo X61 sounds 'beep', the monitor is
Code: 
fan error
Click to expand...
bgavin said:
Fan Error = not seeing tach pulses.
Fan has either died, not turning, or the tach is failed.
Click to expand...

Right, and the boot usually won't proceed after that, until pressing the Esc key. I recently replaced an X200 having such a dead fan.

Well, almost dead ... get a can of compressed air, and find the two places on the fan's air grille where a squirt of air will spin up the fan, a distinctive 'whee!' sound.

One of those places, the inlet, spins the fan forward, the other (exhaust) spins it backwards, which is no use. On mine the inlet is on the left, try there first?

Then, boot up from cold while blowing air to spin the fan, at least long enough to get past that failure point.

This takes some practice and may or may not work, but maybe worth a shot? If it works you can at least backup your system via USB sticks or HDD.
 
Rock said:
The point to show is if the cpu heats because fan is broken then the booting stops.
Click to expand...

Yes, BIOS halts the boot to prevent running without fan if no tacho pulses are detected (unless you press Esc, at least on T and X series Thinkpads I've used).

Spinning up the fan during boot with canned air may work to get past that point (if the tacho works), after which my X200's fan kept working unless temps were too LOW, after which fan stopped and may not restart, so my script never set fan_level below 1.

For me this was a temporary workaround to enable data recovery via dump & restore. Rather than risking surgery I found a nicely working X200 on Ebay for $150, with twice the RAM and SSD.
 
Thank you. I swap the HD "as it was" to another lenovo. I did the blow spray but no results. I will take out fan.
 
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