Thinkpads Forum

I am a big fan of BootIt Next Generation by Terabyte Unlimited, which is a very flexible boot manager, partitioning tool, and DOS-based image product.

Installation of BootITNG requires an 8GB primary partition, ideally. It can handle booting from many primary and/or extended partition volumes.

Any thoughts on using this on my W520? I've seen mentions of UEFI, which I don't profess to understand. I don't want to destroy the Lenovo recovery partition, though I did make recovery media.

If it's DOS-based, then it definitely won't support UEFI boot, which is the "next generation", and is fully supported in the W520 firmware. If your W520 didn't come with Win8 pre-installed, then it won't be booting with UEFI out of the box, so there shouldn't be any trouble installing Bootit, so long as you have the (whopping) 8Gb it needs free. You might need to rearrange your partitions and/or use logical partitions for non-boot drives. The rescue partition should still work so long as you don't touch it (move it around) when making space for Bootit.

But why not install Ubuntu in those 8Gb instead? You would then have all the tools you could possibly dream of for partitioning, disk imaging, recovery, etc.

I mis-spoke. It's 8MB, not 8Gb.

My W520 came with Win7 Pro 64-bit. Forgive my ignorance, but can the W520 use UEFI with Win7? I used to do a lot of multi-OS booting, but haven't mucked around with Win7 and the W520 so I'm pretty far behind the curve now.

Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux is on a long to-do list.

PsychBiller wrote:... can the W520 use UEFI with Win7? ...

Yes, but it takes some work. You can search the forum if you want instructions.

Terabyte says BootIt NG hasn't been updated since 2009 and has been replaced by their Bare Metal product which does mention EFI (UEFI) in their upgrade history. (Haven't used it myself, but I was curious.)

Oops. Meant to say BootIt Bare Metal, not Next Generation. Thanks.