T60 - Standby problems with long in activity

Question

Hi All,
Hopfully someone can point me in the right direction with a issue i'm having with one of the T60 Thinkpads.
Here's the run down:
We brought 3 T60's (type 6369-A56) last december (online web sale). 1 of the three is displaying problems when dealing with standby mode. If the laptop goes into standby mode for longer than anywhere between 30mins to 1hr the laptop doesn't resume from standby when you either open the lid of the laptop or use the Fn function key. When either action is taken to bring the laptop out of standby mode the cresent moon LED remains lit, the HDD LED lights up for a breif second and then turns off, the power indicator turns on and say's solid, the screen remains blank at all times. When this happens you can hear/feel the HDD spinning up and doing something and you can also hear the processor fan spin into action as if it were coming out of standby. Having mains power doesn't seem to make a difference with this problem.
I've already spoken to Lenovo support RE this matter and they believe it is a software related problem. I've done some further testing to try and determine that, this is what I've done...
I took a Norton Ghost image of one of the 2 working T60's HDD's (standby works perfectly on the other two laptops) and used that Image to ghost the HDD in the faulty T60, this gave me two Identical laptops (hardware and software). The power scheme for the laptop is as follows, Turn off Display @ 5mins, go into Suspend Mode @ 15mins. I left both laptops alone at exactly 9:05, 5mins later the screens when blank, @ 15mins later both went into standby mode. 45mins after standby mode had kicked in I came back to both laptops and used the Fn key to resume the laptops(at the same time) and the faulty T60 didn't come back from standby and the same symptons as mentioned eariler happened.
After that happen I decied to see what would happen if I switched the HDD's between the laptops (hdd from faulty laptop into the working laptop, hdd from working laptop into faulty laptop). After switching the HDD's over I ran the same tests as above. Again 45mins after standby mode had been active I used the Fn key to resume from standby and the laptop with the hdd from the faulty laptop worked straight off the batt, however the hdd from the working laptop in the faulty laptop displayed the same problems as mentioned above, thus ruling out the software as the cause of the problem.
My question is, knowing all of that, where is the issue likly to be? Is it going to be RAM related or board related?
Is the likley outcome going to be returning it to Lenovo for repair?
Cheers
Chris
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Answer 1

Thanks Cedric,
At the time the tests were done, both were using battery power (levels were as close as ai could get them at the time, but they were around the 85% mark when the first test was carried out), however as mentioned in my OP the problem is still there when using Mains or Battery power.
Hibernation is disabled on both laptops (it was disabled before I created the Ghost HDD Image, I have checked that both still have it disabled)
Just to satisfy your curiosity, the faulty T60 already had the latest BIOS updates installed as apart of some intital testing that I had performed (its running System BIOS version 7IET32WW), however the working laptop was running the previous version. I've since updated that system and both are now running the same version.
Since upgrading the BIOS so that they both match, I decided to Load BIOS defaults (F9) with only 1 change (that change is to the SATA Mode from AHCI to Compatibility) to both machines.
I ran the same tests as before, but this time using mains power and the problem is still present on the original laptop displaying the symptoms. There also seems to be a second issue which is related to this problem, if i shut the laptop down and try to reboot 9 out of 10 times i get the following message:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM.
Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair
No sometimes I can restart the machine again and it will boot into WindowsXP, however most times I cannot. And a repair will resolve the issue but not always.
In regards to any BIOS settings, there aint that many options in the bios that deal with power management (nothing that I can see that deal with standby mode), whats the problem you've seen with the hibernate function?
Cheers
Chris