I have tried everything to install Fedora (40) on my Thinkpad.
Maybe all of my trouble comes from the protected BIOS - I have bought this laptop in a used condition and only found out later that the BIOS seems to be protected. The previous owner seems to not know the password, too…
That said - here are the results of what I have tried:
the Fedora installer - fails saying “error: open ctree failed”.
everything else – repartitioning with gparted, fdisk, sgdisk, zapping … brings (mostly) no errors at all, but when I look at the partition table after the operations … it all is still the same:
gdisk -p lists the following:
umber Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 206847 100.0 MiB EF00 EFI system partition
2 206848 239615 16.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved …
3 239616 498997048 237.8 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
4 498997248 500115455 546.0 MiB 2700
and whatever I do … it does not change the table!!
The title probably should contain something about bios locked.
It is my understanding that once a bios has been locked with a password it is impossible (or nearly so) to unlock it without the original password.
I suspect that also prevents action that would install a new operating system on the drive, which would explain the inability to change the driver partition table and perform the installation.
Unlocking the bios probably would require contacting the manufacturer. It may not be permitted with the risk of theft and reselling.
multiple hands on laptop and bios locked even manufacturer cant do anything about it usually you need to proove you are the owner showing invoices of purchase as first owner
thanks for your answers. As I understand your replies there is most probably a connection between the locked BIOS settings and my problem of partitioning the hard drive.
I have already contacted the reseller for a statement. As she has presumably no idea of the technical backgrounds; I would guess there is no easy solution other than swapping the HDD - is it?
I will update the title to reflect the locked bios for you.
Sorry to hear the issue but it sounds like you should try and return that laptop since it apparently cannot be used with anything except the currently installed windows.
Yes; absolutely. The additional issue with Windows is, by the way, that it looped in a Bluescreen since I had to force-shutdown the Laptop due to Windows being totally unresponsive. So, in its current state it is a brick, unfortunately.
that laptop is pretty old, likely no support by Lenovo anymore
lenovo uses proprietary BIOS. Normally you could just reflash the BIOS with the default one and the lock is gone.
But it being proprietary means you need a second laptop of the exact same model, save it from there and write it to yours. Or you would need the firmware.rom directly but it is proprietary so lenovo wont give it to you (also their support is absolutely horrendous)
that may be way above your knowledge
the SSD or hard drive have nothing to do with the BIOS. Also installing Fedora or changing partitions has nothing to do with that. The only issue would be enforced secureboot, but Fedora has support for secureboot with Microsofts keys, so no issue here