[x230] Adventures with Recovery media [Long read]

[samveen]

My second hand x230 came with a windows7 install on it's 320G WD Blue (mfg. Oct 2013) with:
- Missing drivers for lots of stuff, including the function key functionality and Battery tools, which annoyed me a bit.
- atleast one worm pre-installed, which annoyed me a LOT.

So I decided to get myself a not-so-expensive 240G Kingston A400 SSD for USD 40 (seems acceptable as per amazon's reviews), and use the correct recovery media to install W7 and proceed from there.

With the help of theterminator93 who had posted about recovery media, I got myself the recovery images and proceed to burn them onto DVDs.

With the new SSD installed, the external DVD (a Buffalo drive) attached, and OS disk 1 of the recovery set ready to boot, I turned on the laptop to get everything sorted. There I hit my first snag: as I had completely forgotten to reset the BIOS to default settings, Win7 files would load, get to the Lenovo Splash screen, and then **poof** - reboot. Not just that, this was an infinite process. After a lot of googling all over, checking MD5 sums and re-burning a DVD needlessly, I read the idiot-resistant documentation on recovery media usage by Lenovo and finally reset the BIOS to it's defaults. And lo and behold; it "worked".

The recovery process first asked for partition table creation, where I selected GPT, then proceeded to ask me to insert, in order

1. Applications And Drivers Recovery Disk 1
2. Applications And Drivers Recovery Disk 2
3. Operating System Recovery Disk
4. Product Recovery Supplemental disk **IF I had it**

After completing the copy, the laptop proceeded to reboot and start the recovery process from the SSD itself. (update #1)

Once the process completed (that took almost 2 hours, 2 DVD drive changes, and 5 or so reboots) I was presented by the first login process for the laptop. I don't remember much of the questions, just that I filled out all required information as correctly as I could, with a few exceptions - I refused to enable all bloatware that was requested by the process (Norton AV, some cloud sync and other such shyte).

On first login, I uninstalled the above bloatware (Chrome and Google search toolbar included), leaving just the Lenovo tools and utilities in place: It was nice to see the function keys work as expected without needing to do a thing. After installing Firefox, next up was M$haft Security Essentials to replace Norton.

ThinkVantage System Update (v4.x) no longer worked, and so I had to download and install Lenovo System Update (v5.x), and it's prerequisites(MS .NET 4.5.2 runtime) by downloading from their respective product pages.

Now I was ready to run the Update processes, both for Win7 and Lenovo, which being a couple of Gigs worth of downloads, took the whole night.

Final observations:

• Windows is auto-activated, showing a ***-OEM-*** product ID, and with a lot of ThinkPad and Lenovo branding all over (I liked the ThinkPad part).
• The recovery media has bloatware, which is hopefully not virus infected, and luckily removable, before the first connection to the internet.
• The Disk layout created by the recovery process creates 4 partitions (no questions asked, other than type of the Partition table; I chose GPT):
  1. An EFI system partition of 100MB
  2. A Microsoft reserved partition (most probably a recovery disk equivalent). (update #1)
  3. The Win7 OS disk which takes most of disk and depends on the Disk size.
  4. Lenovo Recovery partition of size 13.67GB
  5. A partition with no information that is exactly 8.00 GB in size of type "Intel Fast Flash" (update #1)
• Shinking the OS Disk will only reduce it to 51% of it's original size due to NTFS filesystem layout caveats: a copy of the Master file table $Mft is created right in the middle of the disk, and disk manager cannot move it to reduce the disk size further. More research needed as I want the disk in 3 parts: Win7 - Shared - Linux.

Updates #1

• I finally figured out that the last 8G of the disk was an "Intel Fast Flash" partition expressly kept for "Speed start" and it's size is matched to my RAM of 8G. This also means that in case I want to increase the RAM on the x230, I better keep an appropriate sized block of free space (8G) ready and available at the end of the disk **immediately before** the Fast Flash partition to keep utilizing the amazingly fast Win7 startup speed.
• With the help of Google, I finally managed to move the $Mft data to the "new" middle of the newly downsized partition and downsized it down to 80G from the 107.812 G that it was, leaving me a large chunk of free space for Linux and "shared" partitions.
• The newly freed space was divided into 5 partitions via windows as prep for Linux install:
  1. 20G as %home%/workspace to be cross-mounted with $HOME/workspace
  2. 20G as %home%/misc to be cross-mounted with $HOME/misc
  3. 256M as /boot (easier for grub to find boot files if the /boot is a small partition)
  4. 30G as root for linux
  5. The rest for $HOME/VirtualBoxVMs

Updates #2 - Linux
The last time I messed around with Linux on a personal laptop was 2014 when I installed Lubuntu 14.04 on my Toshiba AC-100 tablet. Otherwise, I'm either net-installing Centos on servers or Centos/Xubuntu on VMs in VirtualBox (whatever the Host OS on my office workstation). So I was a little apprehensive on installing Linux on the laptop, and as it turned out, rightly so; the process which should've probably taken 30 minutes at most ended up taking almost 3 hours.

I'd made a bootable USB stick with the Xubuntu 18.04 ISO following the directions over at the ubuntu site, and I've been using that to live-boot, with a partition mounted as "/home" to make the user sessions persistent. This was to be my source for the install.

The installer allowed me to correctly point it to "/boot" and "/", but popped up a warning about a missing partition at the beginning of the disk for boot files. I found this weird as the EFI partition was already in place, so it should have been recognized, but I continued anyway. As you can probably guess, the install succeeded, but with no way of booting into it. A quick search pointed to EasyBCD as a possible solution to using the WinBootloader instead of the Linux one, but that didn't help at all.

So I decided to try messing around with the USB stick bootloader and passing it the appropriate parameters to chain-load the Linux on the SSD. A lot of reading on isolinux and chaining to disk booting followed, without much success.

After a couple of hours of research, I found some page that clearly pointed out the difference between UEFI vs LEGACY USB-booted Boot Menu presentations of the *ubuntu ISOs. I was clearly booting the wrong mode (aka Legacy). A quick bios setting change to prefer UEFI mode to Legacy, and I was back in business. the install process was repeated, much quicker, as this time I just needed to select Replace existing install, with the bootloader installing perfectly.

Booting into linux was awesome, with a caveat: the option `Replace existing install` does not take into consideration any mountpoints other than the root partition, which meant that my `/boot` partition was now orphaned. From personal experience I knew how to fix it so I did:

1. Mount the partition to /newboot
2. Clean out the old boot files in there
3. Unmount /boot/efi
4. Moving the contents of /boot to /newboot
5. Unmount /newboot and add appropriate mountpoint record into /etc/fstab to mount the partition at /boot before the entry for /boot/efi
6. mount /boot and then /boot/efi
7. Run grub-update

The reboot to test this landed me at the grub command-line instead of the menu, because the menu had been updated, but grub was still looking for the menu files in the wrong partition (this is in /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg which required UUID and GPT entry number of the partition containing the boot files.) A quick correction, and I was in business.

Results
Installing from Recovery and then setting up Dual-Boot isn't hard, but does suffer from a few gotchas:

• Hard to reduce the windows partition below 51% of original size
• Fastboot will fail to work correctly if RAM is increased after recovery CD install
• Linux installer better boot in UEFI mode or there will be issues in bootloader installation.

TODOs

• Set up the correct user mappings between Windows and Linux users for each NTFS shared partition.
• Create the correct mount points for them all as appropriate.
• Finally start on work...

[w0qj]

Glad you finally got your X230 up and running using OEM Product Recovery DVD's!

1. There's minimal bloatware from ThinkPad OEM Product Recovery; that's part of the reason why we stick with ThinkPad!
And as you've said, it's easily uninstallable before you get onto the internet for the first time. We do this too!

2. Since you are using SSD, you can also safely uninstall ThinkPad Airbag Protection which is for protecting hard drives only.

3. There's also a Linux forum should you have any specific Linux questions, at:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewforum.php?f=9

Have fun with your X230!

[samveen]

<snip>
2. Since you are using SSD, you can also safely uninstall ThinkPad Airbag Protection which is for protecting hard drives only.
</snip>

• I tried to find the entry for this in Programs and Features, but there was nothing to show for it. Any ideas where to look for the uninstall?
• Is it worth keeping the Coral programs?
• As I have recovery media already created, should I remove the recovery partition and media creation software?
• Is it ok to remove Lenovo Welcome and Lenovo Registration?
• Is there a removal list somewhere that I can refer to, as google isn't showing much of relevance for this query(or I can't think of good search terms?)

[w0qj]

1a. Look in the Programs and Features, and Google for entries in there that you are not sure about, to decide if it can be uninstalled.
***You can leave everything in the Programs and Features for ThinkPad software, most are OK to leave in, and will not slow down your ThinkPad.

1b. If the ThinkPad Airbag Protection is not in Programs and Features, then it's not been installed.

2. Coral programs can be uninstalled; these are not important.
Our X230 did not have any Coral programs installed.

3a. Yes, you can delete the Recovery Partition if you wish, to save some storage space.
3b. Please *DO*NOT* put your data onto your X230 while you experiment with Product Recovery Partition deletion; you may need to do Product Recovery again!
3c. There are freeware disk partition programs out there, such as: [Disclaimer: I don't work for AOMEI, just a fellow ThinkPad user!]
www.disk-partition.com

4. Yes, you can safely uninstall Lenovo Welcome, and safely uninstall Lenovo Registration.

5. Again, it's OK to leave the Lenovo/ThinkPad programs in Programs and Features; they would not slow you down.
If you do decide to uninstall the various Lenovo/ThinkPad programs in Programs and Features, be prepared to do numerous Product Recovery attempts to revert back to starting point (aka Factory Reset).

6a. We used ThinkPad Rescue & Recovery to do snapshot (backup) of the system, before experimenting by deleting various Lenovo/ThinkPad programs in Programs and Features.
6b. Or you can use another similar program (there are many freeware versions out there), such as: [Disclaimer: I don't work for AOMEI, just a fellow ThinkPad user!]
www.backup-utility.com/onekey-recovery.html

Good luck!

..

• I tried to find the entry for this in Programs and Features, but there was nothing to show for it. Any ideas where to look for the uninstall?
• Is it worth keeping the Coral programs?
• As I have recovery media already created, should I remove the recovery partition and media creation software?
• Is it ok to remove Lenovo Welcome and Lenovo Registration?
• Is there a removal list somewhere that I can refer to, as google isn't showing much of relevance for this query(or I can't think of good search terms?)

[samveen]

<snip/>
3. There's also a Linux forum should you have any specific Linux questions, at:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewforum.php?f=9

Have fun with your X230!

Linux is up n running with a couple of caveats. All details added to first post.

I have a question about a possible "product recovery supplemental disk". Is there any such item for the x230? If so where can I get it?

And as for the fun, that I will

[TPFanatic]

I have discovered that you can install the base Windows 7 using just the operating system recovery disk and when it prompts you to put in the Applications & Drivers CD just press "No" and it'll continue...

I discovered this in error when using the CDs on a T42, I had clicked Yes but something went wrong with the Drivers CD but it continued anyway. The more you know.

[samveen]

I have discovered that you can install the base Windows 7 using just the operating system recovery disk and when it prompts you to put in the Applications & Drivers CD just press "No" and it'll continue...

I discovered this in error when using the CDs on a T42, I had clicked Yes but something went wrong with the Drivers CD but it continued anyway. The more you know.

If this is the case, then I am expecting that it might just be possible to create an updated drivers and programs disk. I don't know if it's worth the effort, though.

[onespeedbiker]

I'm curious if you actually tried installing just the X230 OS (Windows 7) media, without Thinkpad drivers and applications disk, because I could not make that work. I have used X61p to load windows 7 on my R61i, and as you said, choosing no when asked to load the applications and drivers and Windows 7 loaded without the second disk. Using the X230 media (same as you 3 disks) my aim was to load windows 7 on a Lenovo G555. After the install (boot) disk initiated booting and partitioning , it asked for Disc #1, which turned out to be the same Disk that was being used; all that was needed was to pressed okay and it continued to load. When it came to the part where it asked for the Applications & Drivers disk, there was no "Okay" or "No", instead there an "Okay" and "Cancel" (at least in my case) and hitting Cancel button shut down the install process. So instead I started from the beginning and let the entire install run with the second disk. In the end there were, enough drivers loaded that it booted using either the correct of generic drivers. There were also some incompatible Levono programs that needed to be deleted, but the Lenovo EOL had the drivers and a few programs that got the computer up and running.

[skx]

Win7 is EOL early 2020, you better invest your energy in a nice linux distro or W10. X230 has perfect support for both.

[dr_st]

Win7 is EOL early 2020, you better invest your energy in a nice linux distro or W10. X230 has perfect support for both.

Win7 won't magically stop working after its EOL. And it won't get infested with malware that will steal all my personal data and hack the internet in 10 minutes, as some reality-challenged people apparently want you to believe.

However, it's true that X230 supports Win10 perfectly (and probably many modern Linux distros as well).

[Ianski]

I just got a Thinkpad X230 and I'm having that same experience - I'd swapped in an SSD, got the recovery disc set (from the same helpful person you mentioned in your original post), hooked up an external DVD drive and ran the set, only to have it go into that nasty endless reboot at the end. I, too, created a second set of DVDs and went through the entire install process a couple more times, only to have it fail at the end.

Before I put in the new SSD, I updated the BIOS (downloaded from Lenovo) from version 2.62, up to the latest 2.77. I thought that would be a good thing. How do I reset the BIOS to its defaults for running the recovery? Does it need to be rolled back to an earlier version, or is just setting the defaults for version 2.77 sufficient?

The previous owner had nothing but grief with the wi-fi which is why it got handed over to me. I'm sure it is a driver or a BIOS issue. The previous owner had also at some point done a straight Win7 Pro re-install, without any of the Lenovo stuff, so all the recovery and lenovo-specific programs are gone from the original hard drive.

[RealBlackStuff]

Have a look at the Ivyprep/1vyrain here: viewtopic.php?f=68&t=129880

However, your too hasty BIOS update to 2.77 may have screwed up that option, since Lenovo has been so "kind" as to block downgrading BIOS.

[Ianski]

Thanks RBS for the Ivyrain suggestion. I didn't really want to mess with the BIOS at that level, but it looks like I'll have to consider it, as resetting the 2.77 bios to the defaults (F9) did not help. My other option will be to try a stock Windows 7 install and then go to Lenovo's site to get all the current drivers, rather than using the recovery DVDs. That's really annoying - why would Lenovo do something that makes the recovery DVD option unworkable? The BIOS upgrade had notes that said one couldn't restore back to an earlier BIOS, but it sounds like Ivyprep can get around that.

When Windows starts up at the end of the recovery sequence, I hear a brief system chime (the "error" chord), just before it shuts down. So my guess is that one of the drivers that comes from the recovery, isn't compatible with some setting in the new BIOS, and that's why Windows aborts. But it is tough to diagnose when you can't get at the Windows event manager to see what's going on. I'd bet that it has to do with the network card drivers and/or BIOS controls, though, since that's the problem the original owner had. Updating the BIOS when I had the original hard drive in, appeared to fix the broken wi-fi - but that hard drive was old and the Windows image on it had other problems, so I don't want to go back to that if I can help it.

[Ianski]

Hmm. One can't download a plain Windows 7 Pro ISO using the product key, the Microsoft website knows that the key is from a preloaded machine and says you have to use the vendor's product recovery discs. I was going to use a retail disc and then put in the product key, but my retail Win 7 is not Windows Pro. So, I'm going to try Windows 10 and see how that goes. According to the Microsoft site it should accept the Win7 product key.

The idea of trying to roll back the BIOS with Ivyprep, sounds like there's a lot of things that could go wrong with that. Maybe as a last resort. Another option would be to repair the original Win7 installation that I have on the original hard drive, take a system image of that, and then clone it on to the new drive.

Very disappointed that the Thinkpad restore discs didn't work - I've always had success with those in the past!

[Ianski]

So, I tried installing Windows 10.
Windows 10 error, right at the end of the installation after installing devices:
"Install Windows: The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click "OK" to restart the computer, and then restart the installation."
Clicking OK results in a reboot, followed by the same message displaying again.

I guess the next thing to try is a Linux distro - maybe it truly is a hardware issue.

[Ianski]

Well, after all that... the wi-fi card seems to be the culprit. FRU 60Y3253, Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205. I removed it from the machine and then re-tried installing Windows 10. Works fine. Just no wireless. I've ordered another identical wi-fi card and when I get it, I'll try installing it and hopefully that'll sort it out. I suppose with the BIOS whitelisting issue these machines have, no other wi-fi cards would work, anyways. I suppose for completeness I could re-try the recovery discs, too, but I'm sure now that the hardware was the cause. Complete removal seemed to be required - simply turning it off with the 'airplane mode' switch on the side wasn't sufficient.

[RealBlackStuff]

If it lets you, do the EC-mod (battery only) so you can also use X220 and knock-off batteries: viewtopic.php?f=69&t=120776
After that, you should still try the Ivyprep/1vyrain.
Plenty people have done it without any problems.

Without doing any mods, get a Lenovo-approved Intel 6300N (FRU: 60Y3233) instead of that crap 6205, it'll run fine in the X230.
After the mods I'd recommend an mPCIE AC-7260 instead.

And without that 6205 wifi-card installed, I would also still do the W7-restore instead of W10.

[samveen]

- I'm glad my writeup helped atleast someone.
- My apologies on the reply after you've already solved the issues (I was busy researching something else, x220 keyboard with 1vyrain).
- By bios reset, I meant select `Reset to Defaults` in the BIOS options.
- The Centrino Wireless-N 2200 actually gives me better signal strength for networks than the Advanced N-6205 and the Ultimate N-6300 with 2 antennae. I actually have a 3x3 WiFi antenna set, with one of the antennae horribly ripped out to put in a webcam, by one of the previous owners (I did not know that when I purchased it, the wire was still in place under the bezel, with just the tip chopped off; I went ahead and purchased an Ultimate N-6300 and attached all 3 antennae wires, but still get poorer performance, and then discovered that disaster under the bezel when I replaced my LCD)

I just got a Thinkpad X230 and I'm having that same experience - I'd swapped in an SSD, got the recovery disc set (from the same helpful person you mentioned in your original post), hooked up an external DVD drive and ran the set, only to have it go into that nasty endless reboot at the end. I, too, created a second set of DVDs and went through the entire install process a couple more times, only to have it fail at the end.

Before I put in the new SSD, I updated the BIOS (downloaded from Lenovo) from version 2.62, up to the latest 2.77. I thought that would be a good thing. How do I reset the BIOS to its defaults for running the recovery? Does it need to be rolled back to an earlier version, or is just setting the defaults for version 2.77 sufficient?

The previous owner had nothing but grief with the wi-fi which is why it got handed over to me. I'm sure it is a driver or a BIOS issue. The previous owner had also at some point done a straight Win7 Pro re-install, without any of the Lenovo stuff, so all the recovery and lenovo-specific programs are gone from the original hard drive.

i

[Ianski]

Thanks Samveen and RBS for your input! I'm so grateful to this forum, in general, for all the good advice I've found here over the many years that I've had ThinkPads. In fact, I recommend Thinkpads to my friends that are looking for laptops, precisely because of the level of support they have, both in this forum and on the Lenovo website. (Hardware maintenance manuals are a godsend!)
I ordered the N6305 already (it was less than $10), so I'll get the machine running properly with that first, then maybe try modding the BIOS and getting the better network card that RBS suggested. There's no rush - I got this computer for nothing and took it on as a challenge/learning experience! She'd upgraded it to 8 GB RAM already and I put in that SSD drive, so it is plenty fast now, and will be much better for travel than my large and heavy T520.
I also like the idea of keeping it Win7 as long as I can; I have a D-Link WiDi device for broadcasting to a big-screen TV (using WiMax); that technology only works with Windows 7. (I use my T520 with it now.)
Was good to learn that the upgrade to Win10 is workable and (when the hardware's good) a simple enough task. I actually installed Ubuntu 18.04 on it, too, in my testing - Ubuntu did successfully install, but the WiFi couldn't find any connections, and the machine would spontaneously reboot whenever the Wi-Fi was on - that's what convinced me that I had a hardware problem.
You guys probably know this, but for other readers, I learned that one can create the necessary Windows 10 ISO - legally - by downloading it here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/softwar ... /windows10. Follow the link for "create installation media (USB flash drive, DVD, or ISO file) to install Windows 10 on a different PC" and then use the machine's Win7 product key (usually located under the battery) when doing the actual installation.

[samveen]

Given how easy it is to switch disks in the x230, I suggest you get yourself 3 inexpensive SSDs, one each for linux, win7 and win10. Pop in the one you want to boot from. It is a bit more cumbersome as compared to a boot menu with multiple boot options, but it's a lot less headache in terms of install and management, especially if you're going to use the Lenovo rescue disks to create the Win7 install.

If' you're going to dual-boot off one disk, don't forget to disable Legacy boot mode while installing, to enforce EFI install mode for linux.

[skx]

So, I tried installing Windows 10.
Windows 10 error, right at the end of the installation after installing devices:
"Install Windows: The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click "OK" to restart the computer, and then restart the installation."
Clicking OK results in a reboot, followed by the same message displaying again.

I guess the next thing to try is a Linux distro - maybe it truly is a hardware issue.

yes, try a linux distro, in case of hardware issue it will actually spit out error and warning messages which will help you identify the issue

[Ianski]

Update - I got the replacement N6205 card in the mail yesterday. Removed the battery, keyboard, and palm-rest, carefully installed the new card, put everything back together, powered the unit on (with the Win10 install SSD installed) and presto, it booted up (after doing a "hard boot" by holding down the power button) and the Wi-Fi works just fine now.

When I get another SSD, I'll try the recovery discs again, but for now I've got a fast and portable Win10 laptop ready to use, just in case I need it during the current crisis.