Curios case of Lenovo Z580 - Secure-Boot / Restricted-Boot Backfires on Windows

English Hardware
1

This is about a different system, friends laptop actually - Lenovo Ideapad Z580
It has got EFI BIOS of Phoenix SecureCore Tiano, BIOS Version - 5FCN91WW (old version), Core i5-3210M, 1TB HDD, etc and it came with Windows 8 preinstalled.

We wanted to up upgrade the system to Windows 8.1 and also any linux distro.

None of the linux ditros except openSUSE 13.1 and openSUSE 13.2 could boot. I tried LinuxMint 17.1, Knoppix 7.4.2 and gparted-live 0.17.01

And windows installer dvd and live usb of windows 7, 8, 8.1 also didn’t boot. rotfl!

Someone told me to perform clean installation of windows 8.1 by cleaning everything from hdd and I did by gparted by booting into opensuse 13.1 kde live including recovery partitions. :frowning: That’s where the problem starts.

Even now none of the Windows Installation media (7, 8, 8.1) boot. Only openSUSE boots, so the system only has openSUSE now. :’(

If it was my laptop, I would have been happy that even though by mistake I got rid of Windows. But, it is my friends system and he only got ready to experience linux distros after seeing what Compiz Fusion could do.

I can’t say to him that, “ok no problem, you got wine to run windows application on openSUSE”. How can I install windows now. Even recovery partition is gone now.

2

I’m going insane now. Will coreboot http://www.coreboot.org/ help

3

Next time I’ll buy laptop will see that it has AMD processor and doesn’t come with windows preinstalled (may later purchase windows)

4

WTH
The given link says

Make sure to disable the Instant Backup and Recovery function or uninstall the "OneKey Recovery "function before reinstalling the operating system. Otherwise, the operating system cannot be reinstalled.

http://support.lenovo.com/in/hi/products/laptops-and-netbooks/ideapad-z-series-laptops/ideapad-z580/documents/HT071297?tabName=Solutions
What now? I removed everything.

5

I wouldn’t - I’ve tested a few AMD laptops lately and all of them have been hot as a brick with relatively poor battery life compared to their Intel breathren.

Also AMD GPU drivers are… to put this nicely, pretty bad on Linux.

6

Personally, I would stick to Intel, much happier with those systems, myself.:wink:

7

My dear vish:

Heaven sakes!

I will not lecture you about the importance of backups before doing something like this, as I think you are already kicking yourself hard enough without any extra help.:wink:

First, this is ideally what you should be doing, now:

You should order the Recovery Media from Lenovo (the last time I did that for someone, it was not all that expensive, and it was delivered overnight no extra charge, but that was several years ago, so I cannot say how it works, now).

To do that, follow this link . You are looking for this part at the bottom of the page:

http://paste.opensuse.org/images/66051912.png

That is what you should do to restore your friend’s computer to the state it was when it was purchased. If I made the same error as you, that is precisely what I would do, since it was my responsibility to protect this before doing the work. And, yes, in my many years in business, I have had to bite the bullet and take responsibility for my mistakes, at my own expense.:frowning:

However, if you wish to just proceed by trying to install Windows from that install disk, that is you (and your friend’s) choice.

In which case, I do not yet understand why you cannot install from the Windows install disk, so we are going to need more information of how you tried to install, and what the errors were. I suspect you will need to check some BIOS settings with UEFI and Secure Boot, but you should be able to do the install … unless you do not have the correct install key.

So …

How did you try to do the windows install?

What error message, if any?

8
  1. Before anything else, you need to inventory your current tools and understand what you can do with them. So,

  • You say you have Windows Install media for various OS. Are they <really> full install media or simply recovery disks? The diff is that <full install media> have full installation sources whereas recovery disks only enable a bootstrap boot and then run a utility pointing to install sources (libraries or backups) in a specified location, typically not on the disk. One way that suggests what type of media they are is to pop the disks into a working machine and inspect the total size of the files (not the disk capacity which is both used and unused space). Full install sources will easily require a couple gigs of files at least, whereas a bootstrap plus recovery app is likely less than 550MB.

  • You need to verify whether you <really> wiped your recovery partition or not. Run gParted Live and inspect the disk. Be sure not to boot the disk itself. If you removed your recovery partition, there is a small to moderate chance you can recover your Recovery partition, Read up on “undeleting partitions” or similar. The idea here is if you haven’t written data that over-writes the data, you can create a new partition table that’s identical to your original which would would restore access to the partition. If this is an option you want to look into and have problems reading the literature about it, post again here. Remember, doing <anything> but reading your disk will further lessen your chances this might work, and would only <maybe> work if your HDD is very large relative to the files written to disk (nowadays fairly likely).

  • If you’ve run a OEM based solution to “recover” or “install” Windows, you might have not only lost access to, but also over-written the disk which would eliminate all chances of recovering data on disk. So, be careful. These OEM recovery and install disks are typically only re-branded Microsoft disks, and are extremely poor describing what happens technically (prob assuming the typical User is too dumb to understand anyway) so be careful and know that there is a high possibility of making a catastrophic mistake making things worse using OEM disks even if you do everything as right as possible.

After considering everything in this thread (both by myself and others), you may eventually find yourself unable to recover Windows in your current situation. So, then your next likely options…

  • You didn’t describe your current partition setup. I don’t know if you had created a separate partition for each OS or not, and what your layout is. If you haven’t already created a partition for the second OS (usually Windows, but from your description now would be Windows) you’d have to do so. It matters little whether you start with openSUSE or Windows as your first OS, the bootloader for that first OS is the primary bootloader. The second OS is then installed in its own partition with an entry in the first bootloader pointing to the second OS bootloader. This configuration is typically called “chain loading.”

  • If (yes, you have to verify) you have full install source, you should be able to simply run your install starting from within the first OS… Or, at least I personally have yet to see when this doesn’t work. Of course, you can’t simply boot to your new OS install, you might run into UEFI security issues and the install may or may not be able to recognize the first OS.

HTH and IMO,
TSU

9

BTW: The last time I used them, the discs as ordered from Lenovo will recreate the Recovery Partition as well as restore the Factory Installed Windows system.

10

Re AMD vs Intel, in the see-saw tech advances over time, it’s my impression that the best Intel (i7) is likely superior to the best AMD today but is not necessarily true always and especially if you’re not using the very latest hardware.

So, if you’re not paying top price for the very latest, YMMV and may not make that much diff.
Your decision then should be to inventory the various chips used and research Linux support, so for instance even today a year after I bought my laptop there is no Linux support for the internal wireless NIC (BCM4352). I have to either run Linux in a VM using Windows as the base OS or use a USB dongle.

TSU

11

… there is, perhaps, another solution where you would not have to purchase the disks from Lenovo:

If you know of anyone who has a Lenovo laptop that shipped with the same version of Windows as your friend’s laptop was shipped with, you can clone the Recovery partition from that laptop. It does not need to be the same model.

It will work and will actually be legitimate, since it is the vendor’s system-wide mass license. It will license itself properly according to the laptop you are recovering it to.

So, if you are so lucky:

Check the layout of the drive you are cloning from. You do not need to create any of the other partitions, but you want to make certain you have the same type of Partition Table (msdos or gpt). Then, check the position of the Recovery partition on that machine. You want to place it in the same location when you restore it to your friend’s laptop; that is, if it is at the end of the drive on the source laptop, you want to place it at the end of the drive on the target laptop, and if it is near the front, make certain you restore it to the same position (starting sector) as it was on the source laptop.

To do that, first make a partition image of the Recovery partition only. Then, create an empty partition the same size in the same location on the target laptop. Recover the partition image to that empty partition.

From that point, you would simply follow the instructions for “Restoring from Recovery Partition” (or similar wording).

If the source laptop is exactly the same model, then you are done. If it is not the same model, you probably have a bit of work ahead of you, a little time consuming, but not difficult.

In the latter case, you will now have to go back to the support site for your friend’s laptop and download all the software and drivers they have available for that machine. Everything you need will be there.

Then, you will need to install all of the downloaded software and drivers on your friend’s laptop, after which you will be done with your recovery.

Good luck, I will keep watching this thread.:wink:

12

en_windows_8.1_with_update_x64_dvd_4065090.iso 3.83 GB burned it on DVD (I’m able to boot that on my system #1 but not on his system) and also made live usb using Windows7-USB-DVD-Download-Tool-Installer-en-US
en_windows_8_1_x64_dvd_2707217.iso 3.63 GB (made live usb)

I deleted everything by booting using gparted by booting into openSUSE 13.1 kde
Next I tried to boot into the installation media. Unsuccessful with any windows version and LinuxMint 17.1, Knoppix. Was successful in booting into openSUSE-13.2 liveUSB (was made from 13.2 DVD iso) so I installed openSUSE 13.2.
That means I overwrote on the HDD

After installing openSUSE 13.2 the partition structure (have booted into it not on live)
/dev/sda 931.51 GiB
/dev/sda1 300 MiB FAT /boot/efi
/dev/sda2 8 GiB Swap
/dev/sda3 40 GiB ext4 /
/dev/sda4 883.21 GiB XFS /home
tmpfs 1.87 GiB TmpFS /dev/shm
tmpfs 1.87 GiB TmpFS /run
tmpfs 1.87 GiB TmpFS /sys/fs/cgroup

I can do that, the laptop is still in warranty. I hope, I have not breached their terms of warranty

13

That does not matter … or at least it did not the last time I dealt with them.

No, not really, although they will charge for the discs, since wiping it out does not qualify for warranty repairs, anyway. That is why they always advise customers that the first thing they should do is run the Lenovo-supplied backup program to create Factory Recovery disks when they first get the machine.

In fact, the last time I ordered these discs, it was for an IBM Lenovo that someone bought second hand from one of those used PC places and it came without any operating system installed. It was way past warranty, and it was no longer “supported”, although they still had the software and driver downloads and all under their support area on the Lenovo site.

It was one of their earliest XP machines, had shipped with XP Pro.

But, because it – like most of their machines – came with an operating system & software installed and licensed to that machine, and the Factory Restore discs were still in stock, they sold and shipped me the discs based on the Model and Serial number of that machine. I think I paid about $30.00 Cdn total and they arrived at my door the next day.

Note that, from all these manufacturers, the shipped operating system license is tied to the machine, so if a person disposes with a machine, the operating system is legally required to go with the machine.

That is why you can clone from another similar machine, and as long as the operating system is the same, it is covered under the manufacturer’s bulk license to be placed on your machine.

14

He, went to service center. They said that it was a bios error as they themselves were not able to boot into their installation media and did something with the bios. My non-nerd friend didn’t ask about problem. The service guys asked for extra money as they said software problems are not covered under warranty.

They did normal installation and did not **prepare recovery partition.

The case is solved now. Thanks guys for helping.
**

15

That was dishonourable by them, since it was a BIOS problem, not a software problem!>:)

Glad to see you are off the hook, now, though.

16

I hope you made a image back up to reload the system , if that failure occurs again,