How To Get Into Lenovo Bios

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I have a dilemma where I need to boot from a flash drive (possibly a couple different ones) on the Lenovo Twist laptop. It's running 8 and I believe it has a SSD or Hybrid drive in it. It boots too fast and I also have not been able to find out how to get it to give me a boot menu or even get into the BIOS. It doesn't boot into Windows. Just a black screen. Just wondering if anyone has any experience with this.

Thanks,

A.J.

So I got it! You have to get into BIOS (press enter on boot to get into options), disable Secure Boot and then you can enable Legacy boot which enabled me to boot to my flash drive to run diags. Thanks for all the help!

A.J.

19 Replies

If it runs UEFI as most new Windows 8 devices do, you wont be able to boot to it. The most recent Laptop I used had to have the legacy boot enabled in BIOS to see the flash drive but then you could not see the Win8 Partition. I unfortunately do not know how to access a BIOS menu on that device, but what exactly are you needing to access on the flash drive? A utility or something?

"Upon start-up repeatedly press Enter at the Lenovo splash screen, this should give you the interrupt start-up menu. There should be an option to enter BIOS from this menu. If the little circle of dots shows at the bottom of the Lenovo tag then the Operating System is loading and you will have to attempt again. If you hear a beep or you see a sentence at the bottom of the Lenovo tag at start-up then it has worked. I did successfully load BIOS after a couple of tries."

Taken from Lenovo forums.

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Edge-S-series/How-to-enter-BIOS-in-lenovo-twist/td-p/966377

You aren't going to be able to boot into the flash drive unless it has a uefi partition still. You will have to enable legacy mode thereby disabling the Win8 partition.

*Experience with an HP Win 8 machine last night trying to reset password.

Sounds like this works you just have to make sure to shut down all the way. You can't use the windows 8 "shutdown". Using restart sounds like it does the trick or you can hold down shift while clicking shutdown. I don't have a twist so I am not sure if this works but I am interested because I have a twist on the way and this seems like good to have information.

This sounds like it gets you to the BIOS screen, in which the boot menu will most likely not list the flash drive. I would like to hear back from A.J about If he can actually boot to it.

Evanalmightyyy wrote:

You aren't going to be able to boot into the flash drive unless it has a uefi partition still. You will have to enable legacy mode thereby disabling the Win8 partition.

*Experience with an HP Win 8 machine last night trying to reset password.

I've seen the same thing.......just can't get into anything with this........which is not good...........can't even run diags...CRAP!

A.J.

P.S. I will keep you guys posted on what I try and if it works.

Thanks.

You have to go into BIOS and turn on LegacyBoot to be able to boot to pretty much anything that is not UEFI ready. This is fine but unfortunately makes it near impossible to use utilities to scan or work on the Win 8 partition as it is now not going to be seen by anything. The amount of trouble I went through to do a password reset on a UEFI Win 8 Dell was ridiculous just because I could not get a password utility to work while SecureBoot was active.

A.J.

P.S. Turns out they had a failing HDD. It's failing pretty bad. Just FYI.

Thanks,

A.J.

A.J. Stringham Geek wrote:

P.S. Turns out they had a failing HDD. It's failing pretty bad. Just FYI.

Thanks,

A.J.

AHHHH all you needed was to check the drive itself, I figured you needed to get into the Win8 partition for virus scans and the like. Glad it worked out for you!!!

Twist has an option to enable both UEFI and Legacy. I use this after I ghost to go make the boot partition bootable again.

evanalmightyyy - I am trying to get into my lenovo twist to reset the password by booting from a usb disk using a utility by Peter Nordahl. When I turned off UEFI to use legacy and turned off SecureBoot, I could boot into my usb disk and could see the Linux stuff loading. BUT, the utility could not see the laptop hard disk partition for windows, I guess since it is not 'seen'. How did you get your user password reset? I am willing to try whatever I can to prevent having to reinstall windows.

---RobinInIowa

For the Lenovo 500 you hold the FN button down and the F2 key down at the same time once you see the logo. Then you can go to the Boot menu and turn on the Legacy. Then you can boot from a USB or DVD. To get to the boot menu you hold down the small button to the right of the power button. You hold that down for a short and the boot menu will come up. You can select what you want to boot from.

I am working on the G510 model, this also uses FN button and the F2 key. This one came with Windows 8, I am installing Windows 8Pro on to this (needs to be joined to domain). When I first tried everything went ugly and had to revert back to the 8 version, then I started to read and see what others were doing. This has helped but still looking for what I would exactly like to find or at least more info., running out of patience and time . I am going to just go with what I have found thus far.

In windows 8 what you have to do is just restart your pc/laptop after entering into windows 8 and press enter button it will show your bios entering screen...... This is mrittyun Email me for any query -mrittyun@rediffmail.com

jonworthy

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Sep 23, 2014 at 15:11 UTC

Pressing F12 (may have to do it repeatedly) will get you to the bootable devices menu with UEFI enabled.

On my Twist I had to go into more depth to get a USB to boot. Even after I had turned all the UEFI security off I still had no option to boot of a USB HDD. The only option I have were USB CD and USB FDD. I had to "Load Setup Defaults" under the Restart tab after disabling "OS Optimized Defaults". This along with disabling UEFI Secure Boot and enabling Legacy boot finally allowed me to boot of a USB to install windows.

haha if no one has figured it out yet you have to hold the shift key when hitting the shutdown button with your mouse to completely shut it down its goes into a hybrid sleep state normally for faster boot times.

SW-Desperado

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Jan 11, 2015 at 07:14 UTC

i have to say that I have never seen so many first posts in a thread in my life... something about the topic got the new folk all hot under the collar eh?

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