r/toughbook

I got rid of Antix and also got banned permanently on my other account Lol, on 4GB RAM on this bad boy, MX Linux is working mint with XFCE

Looking to sell in bulk but will sell individually as well. All are grade a touch 8Gb ram 256 ssd can upgrade to 1TB.
All have docking stations, genuine Panasonic charger. All port covers intact. £200 for 256gb plus shipping. 600 pcs available. They also come with a spare battery in the dvd drive slot

Picked up a second-hand CF-33 Mk1 (i7-7600U, 16GB DDR3 soldered, 512GB SATA SSD), did a clean Win10Pro Panasonic Recover install than forced a Win11 Pro update install, ran great for weeks as a headless RDP box.

The trigger: Closed the lid to hibernate one evening. Never woke up. Forced shutdown, and from then on: solid green power LED, no POST, no Panasonic logo, no beep (occasionally a single non-chime beep). EC clearly alive the whole time — battery charging/LEDs, backlight hotkeys, and power-button short/long-press all behaved correctly — but the CPU/chipset handoff to POST just wasn't happening.

What I ruled out, methodically:

• Full capacitor drain (battery+AC out), tested from 30 min up to 3 days — no effect
• Docking station — tested tablet-only, no change
• Internal display — tested external HDMI monitor, no video either way
• RAM — soldered, not a variable
• CMOS/RTC battery — disconnected 15 min, no lasting fix
• Battery presence — fails identically on AC-only

It did eventually recover, after about a week of failed attempts — intermittently, unpredictably, with no controllable variable (drain duration, AC vs battery) correlating to success. It reached a "Bad System CMOS" prompt once, pressed F2, and got frozen cursor and unresponsive keyboard. One time only. Not repeatable. Continued with only the green power light coming on. Then one day, the full Panasonic logo appeared before hanging. One time only. Not repeatable. Continued with only the green power light coming on. Then finally, after taken the batteries out for at least 2 whole days, tried to power up, Panasonic logo appeared, then displayed ">>Checking media presence and >> No media present" and eventually booted into Windows. That window of working access was what let me pull Event Viewer logs.

Confirmed root cause of the original trigger, via those logs: Kernel-Boot Event ID 16: "Windows failed to resume from hibernate with error status 0xC0000411" — the documented STATUS_HIBERNATION_FAILURE code — immediately followed by an unclean-reboot Critical event (Kernel-Power 41) and an "unexpected shutdown" (EventLog 6008). A Panasonic firmware update had also been silently pushed via Windows Update a month earlier (28/6) — can't confirm it caused this, but it's a plausible contributing factor given the timing.

The twist: Disabled hibernate entirely (powercfg /hibernate off) and set Sleep to Never (plugged in) for RDP reliability. System ran fine for over a week. Then it died again — this time triggered by me choosing Restart instead of Shutdown, no hibernate involved at all**.** Same dead symptoms as the original failure.

Where I've landed: EC is functioning correctly across every test; the fault sits between EC and CPU/chipset POST completion. It's recurred on two different trigger types (hibernate-resume, and separately a plain restart) and hasn't correlated to any variable I can control. This is DIY-exhausted — next step is a repair shop with rugged-laptop board-level experience (voltage rail monitoring / thermal imaging), since a sealed tablet with soldered RAM isn't realistic for me to board-swap myself.

Posting in case anyone's seen this exact failure signature on a CF-33, or has thoughts on what's worth asking a repair tech to check first.

Photos

1. Stuck at Bad System CMOS. Once F2 is pressed, see (2)
2. Cursor appeared and stuck. trackpad couldn't move it. Left it like that for a day before switching off.
3. Got to the Panasonic Logo and stuck. Left it like that for a day before switching off.
4. video: finally booted after over 1 week. Worked for about 1 week and the "can't get past POST" situation came back.

Frustrated of the durability and battery life on an iPad Pro M4 without modem I bought a refurbished CF-20MK2 with built in modem for work, as it's more robust to dust, water droplets and dirty hands. A few years ago at Lufthansa we were issued CF-54 notebooks, bare configuration, and since then wanted a Toughbook. Used also a Getac S410 without touchscreen and the track pad is a pain as many entries are long and require lots of scrolling.

I will upgrade it to a CF33 with keyboard or keep this one for a longer if I find a decently priced keyboard and battery.

cf-31 mk4 i3-2310m
pimp this brick running guix system
i can also play among us and minecraft so dont ridicule my cpu
learning guile scheme as my first lisp
love it

I also need a more stable Linux distro because Q4OS is shit