Bought a used Lenovo Thinkpad P51 Core i7-7820HQ. There's no OS on the SSD. I ran the quick built-in diagnostics, and it passes all of them. I copied the Debian installer debian-11.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso onto a USB stick, which worked fine in the machine. The install process went normally until the end, where it says to remove the USB stick and reboot. The machine starts up and if I'm not mistaken it tries to boot from the network – the following text appears on the screen:
Code: Select all
Intel Boot Agent CL v0.1.09 © Intel Corp.
Initializing and establishing link ...
Code: Select all
CLIENT MAC ADDR: xx xx xx xx xx xx GUID: [a bunch of hex digits] DHCP . . .
That text goes away and comes back once. Then a box appears where you can select a boot device – the heading is Boot Menu. It has 2 lines:
Code: Select all
NVMe0: PM980a NVMe SED Samsung 512GB
PCI LAN: IBA CL Slot 00FE v0109
The 1st line clearly refers to the SSD and it's the default. When I press Enter with the 1st line selected, the screen goes dark briefly then the Boot Menu comes back. This happens as many times as I press Enter. It seems the machine can't find a way to boot from the SSD.
I downloaded the Debian Live image debian-live-11.2.0-amd64-xfce.iso and copied it to a USB stick. The machine boots up just fine to the live desktop. It gives a choice of 4 installers and I tried a couple of them with the same result as before. One of the installers gives you the choice of 2 boot methods – MBR or GUID. I think the other installers all use MBR, so I tried GUID. Everything gives the same result: the machine tries to boot from the network, then goes to the boot menu.
I've tried changing several BIOS settings, especially those having to do with UEFI vs Legacy Boot and CSM support. So far nothing has made any difference. Right now UEFI / Legacy is set to “Both” with Legacy First.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Does anyone here have a P51? I've been using Thinkpads with Debian for a long time; currently a W520 which I believe is like the P51's predecessor. I'm stumped.