Lenovo x240 weird boot issue

pacmania1982 · November 30, 2020

Guys - this thing is driving me crazy.

I picked up a Lenovo x240 from eBay. 1.7GHz Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB Samsung SSD well used, without Windows 10 for cheap. I made a Windows 10 USB boot installer. Booted it from the installer, installed Windows 10, connected to my WIFI, downloaded some drivers, Windows updates and what not. Everything worked. I turned it off put it away. Now when I open it up to boot, It tries to PXE boot because it can't find a bootable volume. If you press Enter and manually specify the SSD it'll boot and work without issue until you turn it off again. Then the same thing. Over and over again.

I've updated the BIOS, I've restored the factory BIOS settings, I've changed the boot order but NOTHING I do seems to make any difference. The internal back up clock battery is fine as the date and time is OK when you pull out the main battery and leave it for a while. I just can't figure it out.

I did think it might be that the BIOS is set to UEFI but when I did the Windows install, it didn't create the usual EFI partition. So I changed it to legacy BIOS mode and reinstalled Windows 10. Exactly the same issue. One interesting note is when I boot from USB to do a reinstall of Windows 10, it says there are no partitions, yet I know there are because it'll boot if you tell it. I've tried a second SSD I have laying around and the behaviour is exactly the same with that one too.

I've never encountered anything like this before and an damned if I know how to fix it.

Anyone got any ideas or suggestions? Its driving me crazy. Yeah I'm happy with the machine as once you've told it how to boot, its pretty quick and doing restarts don't have this issue. Just cold boots it seems.

Thanks!