T520 fan has stopped spinning (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by solrize@lemmy.ml to c/thinkpad@lemmy.ml

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Not sure what has happened, whether it's physically broken or something went wrong with the software. So the machine overheats fairly quickly now. This is running Debian 11 (bullseye) and /proc/acpi/ibm/fan says:

status:		enabled
speed:		0
level:		auto

so I don't know if the heat is being recognized. The CPU does clock down as it gets hotter. I'm not getting any type of overtemperature alerts though, and I haven't found any place in the acpi tree to read the temperature. That's annoying since there must be some sensors in there.

It looks like there is a program called "thinkfan" in trixie so I might try to upgrade the machine tomorrow. I can only do so much at a time before the box gets too hot.

Any help? Thanks.

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[-] monovergent@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago

Wild guess, but have you used me_cleaner at any point? This happened to my T510 when I tried neutering the Intel ME, sometimes the fan works, sometimes it wouldn't, and no apparent errors came up.

[-] solrize@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

No I've never used me_cleaner. Maybe I should. It's possible that the fan got stuck and disabled itself but later the obstruction cleared. I did notice some noise from it, and it's spinning quietly now.

this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026

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