USB Boot Logical Device Letter

[Dögen]

Hi,

I've been sitting here struggling with this issue for oh, all of last week and I finally gave up but even so, I figured I'd ask in the even that I decided to go it again later on.

I wanted to do a clean install of Windows because of the degree to which ThinkVantage software was making a powerful machine sluggish at best (a power user's nightmare). Since I have an x60s, I needed to install from bootable media via USB. The thing is, anything that I used as a bootable device, which the BIOS picked up as USB HDD, may it be a USB DVD-ROM or a USB Key, it brought me to a C:\ prompt at startup and so I couldn't install Windows because, from the little I understand, "C:\" was already being occupied and it complained that it couldn't find a hard drive.

I can't imagine being the only one that has struggled with this so my fellow Thinkpadians, please enlighten me as to how you can get an external bootable USB device to boot in A:\ or D:\.

In the end, I used the recovery partition and did a custom complete restore and opted out of all bundled software. As to be expected, it still installed some of its software but certainly not as much. After a clean startup, it was using less then 300MB of RAM. After installing a firewall & an anti-virus it was still well under 400MB. The factory default was over 600MB! I was using OllyDbg one day to look at an executable and I started noticing password manager was getting it's dirty fingers in everything. That's when I had enough.

Call me a hypocrite but like most people, I like convenience and speed over having to deal with slow security suites. The only "thinkVantage" bloat that I have now is the fingerprint software, active protection system (does anyone even know if it's really worth keeping this bloat?), power manager, rescue and recovery and finally System Update for convenience but I disabled the service that was using over 10MB of RAM (SUService.exe) for absolutely nothing.

Needless to say, I'm really disappointed in some of the design decisions that Lenovo has made with the default installation they deliver. Including all that bloatware by default made what is otherwise a very good performing machine to be a failed expectation at first. How are we ever going to see the real performance of the machine when their software keeps on bloating proportionally?

I'm happy to say that, after all that work, the machine is now extremely responsive (night & day type difference). When I start the machine I only have to swipe my finger to logon windows which is quickly does—oh I also disabled the security chip which was almost doubling my boot time; a feature that wasn't necessary for what I use it for.

Hehe, if you've read all this then you may have forgotten my main question so I'll remind you: How can an external USB device boot to something other then C:\ at startup which seems to be assigned by default?

[smvp6459]

Did you try changing the harddrive to "compatibility" mode in the BIOS?

[Dögen]

Did you try changing the harddrive to "compatibility" mode in the BIOS?

No I can't say that I have.

I'll try it tonight. Thanks for the advice.