T540p Bios/Boot Issues

[gentoo9ball]

I just got this brand new computer and switched out the hard drive with my current SSD and 16gb of pc-12800 1.35v.

Since i wasn't using a UEFI compatible bios before, I switched this one into legacy mode. When I rebooted, the computer just hung at the first screen. It will not go into bios or boot menu or anything. It will accept keypresses for the first few seconds of boot, but then just hangs saying "Entering Setup" or other appropriate messages. Switching the hardware back to the factory parts had no effect on this state.

After that I started messing around and found that some older ddr3 ram allowed me to get into the bios and change it back to UEFI. In that mode, even with secure boot disabled, I cannot boot to DVD, USB, SSD, or the original hard drive. It is almost like they aren't recognized. Is there an issue with the 1.11 bios here?

Thanks,
Bob

[mikemex]

No idea but new UEFI BIOSes are very bad. I have a couple of issues that they never fixed:

1) The machine doesn't remember the mSATA drive password after restart.
2) The battery can't be charged to anything but 100% unless you want to miss calibration pretty fast.

And this is with T420/X220. I can only imagine how bad newer models are.

[Medessec]

UEFI just works very differently from legacy in that it integrates much more with the Windows 8 boot sequence, to allow for ultra fast boot-times.

The best you can do I suppose is just re-install the original hardware, and alternate between UEFI and Legacy until you get everything working again. You'll have to look at all the settings in the BIOS and make sure it's set up properly. I remember trying to get Windows 7 to work with a Dell laptop that belonged to a friend of mine- UEFI would absolutely not work, so we had to use Legacy for it to work properly.