Lenovo Laptop Love..Not!

LXer Feature: 1-Nov-2019 I was recently given a laptop that came with Windows 10 on it and wanted to install Linux over it because well. Windows sucks.

Hello Everyone,

The story below is my journey in getting Linux installed on a laptop that was given to me, hope you enjoy..

I was recently given a new Lenovo laptop with Windows 10 on it and at the moment it is the only computer I own. I have tried everything I know (which I know is limited) and looked up all kinds of information on the internet and I cannot get it to boot from anything other than the internal hard drive it has and/or install Linux on it.

I would like to state for the record that having been a Linux user for many years and trying and using many different versions of Linux that the Windows 10 I am stuck at that moment using is a serious pain in the behind. It is slow and using the internet reminds me the the dial-up days in that I get choppy performance and frozen browser pages all the time. If Windows 10 is supposed to be an upgrade or update from the previous version of Windows..LOL! Yeah right.

The laptop is a new Lenovo Idea Pad S340-15IWL, Model Name-81N8 with 4G of RAM, a 926gig SSD and a Intel Core i3-8145U 2.30GHz chip running an x64 version of Windows 10. Not the greatest specs but then not the worst either. It could have more RAM and a faster processor but a huge Hard Drive.

For the heck of it I decided I would try to install Linux on a 128G USB 3.0 jump-drive I happen to own. I downloaded Linux Mint 19.2 on the laptop and I installed a free program called rufus to attempt to install the Linux Mint .iso on to the jump-drive so as to be able to then boot from the jump-drive but I got an error saying that some windows program was using the .iso and cannot be written to the jump-drive. Now if I try it I get an 'ISO image extraction failure' error. Like I said it I did it just to see if I could, and I can't.

I still need to figure out the boot loader issue. I have tried to change the boot sequence to no avail. I actually have not been able to change anything about the boot sequence even with all the tips and tricks I have looked up and in my trials have learned that Lenovo is notorious for disabling options on their boot loaders so I am at a loss as to where to go from there. If the boot loader really is impossible to change in any way I may have to come to the realization that installing Linux on my Lenovo is just not going to happen. But I'm not going down without a fight.

Unfortunately I do not have the receipt for the laptop. It was given to me 'as is', for free, no strings attached. Brand new I have found that it was worth roughly $400 so I don't think I would get much for it if I were to sell it to a pawn shop. I'll have to look into that more though. I can still reset it and take it back to "day one" whenever I want so I know that is a positive for me.

I know that this article may seem a lot like the two previous ones by James Dixon. The links to those articles are here and here. But in having what at first seemed to be similar issues I thought I would share my experiences and see what you think.

Update: 31-Oct-2019

Well one of the scripts I looked up did change the login prompt on the boot screen and add the option to boot from a USB. Now I just need to figure out how to get Linux Mint installed onto the jump-drive. I wiped the USB drive and started from scratch with rufus in installing Linux on it and it installed successfully.

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I think I got it figured out! I was able to get it to boot into Linux Mint and Install. I'm actually not sure what exactly what I did but I was able to get it to boot into Linux Mint and Install. I installed it alongside of Windows (In case I need it..Not!) and split the hard drive into two equal 500gig partitions. I have the option to boot into Linux or Windows at the startup screen.

My laptop is like night and day compared to Windows 10. The speed difference is amazing. I can have multiple tabs open in a browser window without the computer freezing up on me for minutes at a time. What a gift!