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Having trouble getting my T410's BIOS to recognize an external SSD partition

T400/T410/T420 and T500/T510/T520 Series
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Erentigionation
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Joined: Sun Jul 08, 2018 10:14 am
Location: Falmouth, MA

Having trouble getting my T410's BIOS to recognize an external SSD partition

#1 Post by Erentigionation » Wed Aug 22, 2018 10:42 am

I installed Ubuntu Bionic Beaver on a partition on a 500 GB external SSD. However, I am unable to boot from that partition. There are about three or four USB devices listed in the BIOS Setup program, including USB CD, USB HDD, USB FDD, etc. I was able to boot the Arch Linux ISO from an SD card, also connected through USB, but I can't seem to get my BIOS to recognize the SSD. It kept booting from the internal HDD where I have Windows 7 installed, even when I moved it to the bottom of the boot list. When I disabled the HDD altogether so that my Thinkpad could only boot from the SSD, I got a "non-bootable medium" error message. I did identify one problem, which was that the boot flag was not set to the Ubuntu partition (it was set to my Windows backup partition, which had no operating system on it, so that would explain the error message), but even after fixing this problem I still get "non-bootable medium" when trying to boot from the SSD. It's probably worth pointing out that I don't have a clue what all these different USB devices in the BIOS represent. Do they represent individual USB ports (my Thinkpad has four)? Do they represent different kinds of devices, which are determined by looking at device metadata or something?

RealBlackStuff
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Re: Having trouble getting my T410's BIOS to recognize an external SSD partition

#2 Post by RealBlackStuff » Wed Aug 22, 2018 11:13 am

Power off, plug the external drive in a USB port, then boot and immediately press F12.
You'll want the USB HDD from that menu, assuming the drive is recognized.
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