X220 boot and installati​on problems

Question

Hello everybody,
this will be a confusing post ;-)
Introduction
I just got my new X220 4290-W4H with 8GB of RAM and an additional UMTS-card and tried to install an OS on it. Installing Linux using an USB key worked but it wasn't able to boot with grub not beeing able to load stage 2. But since I guess Lenovo will only support you when you are using Windows I continued with the experiments with a Windows 7 x86-64 with SP1 from the MSDN-AA. I also tried using USB sticks instead of a DVD and different variations in the BIOS (UEFI only, legacy only, both, SATA, compatible, ...) but for this post I reset everything to the default.
Preparation
To have a clean starting point I reset the BIOS to the defaults by using the corresponding load-function in the last screen. In addition I attached the internal harddrive to another Linux computer and nulled the first and the last GB of the HDD. So nothing of interest (no mbr, no partition table, no gpt) is on it.
First boot with "new" HDD
To have some kind of reference, I first started the computer with the HDD inserted only filled with zeros and the lenovo external DVD writer attached by USB. There the aforementioned Windows 7 x86-64 SP1 DVD was inserted. I measured the following timing with a stopwatch:
00:00 switched on
00:08 screen got switched on
00:21 BIOS splash screen disappears (isn't that a little bit long? Well, let's save this for another thread ;-) )
00:26 the Windows boot loader starts loading files
01:10 loading of Windows finished (splash screen)
01:23 the language selection dialog appears
timers reset because of manual intervention
00:00 begin installation by clicking on "install now"
00:38 setup started
timers reset because of manual intervention
00:00 accept license
00:00 start a user-defined setup
00:00 create a 50.000 MB big partition on the empty disk
00:07 partition creation finished (one exactly 100MB big "system" partition and a 48.7 GB "primary" partition)
IMPORTANT: sometimes this creation step takes f.ex. 65 seconds. I have not yet found a pattern which can perhaps be found - but I did to many tries to remeber anything anymore...
timers reset because of manual intervention
00:00 click next, start copying of windows files
00:03 abortion with the following error
The error message basically says that Windows setup wasn't able to format one of the partitions bevause there was an error when preparing the partition. The error number is 0x80070057.
Second boot with HDD modified by Windows
Now I reboot the computer and here it really gets weird. Not only Windows, but also the BIOS is freaking out. That shouldn't happen, no matter what's on the harddrive. Especially big differences are markes in red.
00:00 switched on
00:08 screen got switched on
03:03 BIOS splash screen disappears
03:28 the Windows boot loader starts loading files
04:12 loading of Windows finished (splash screen)
05:49 the language selection dialog appears
timers reset because of manual intervention
00:00 begin installation by clicking on "install now"
01:20 setup started
timers reset because of manual intervention
00:00 accept license
00:00 start a user-defined setup
00:00 choose the partition of the last run, which is beeing recognized
00:00 click next, start copying of windows files
00:03 abortion with the error of before
Possible Solutions
As I alread wrote, playing with different combinations of the BIOS settings didn't help. I am here also simply using the defaults as it came from Lenovo (no UEFI forced, and forcing legacy does not help). Using a USB stick instead of the DVD (actually I started like that) and on another USB port didn't help.
The harddrive itself seems to be ok. I can write and read (md5sum checked) data on the HDD over a USB adapter on another computer with around 30MB/s and when booting a Linux live system on the X220 I can reach even around 80MB/s and more for writing zeros on it. So it does not seem to be a problem of the kernel or the harddrive but later on of the BIOS and the bootloader.
Searching the net I found the suggestion to create the partitions by hand and let Windows simply use them. This did not help and took an increadibly long time.
Help
Please don't forget that I am not trying to do something "strange". I only want to install a vanilla Windows 7 SP1 DVD onto a vanilla HDD in an unchanged X220. Even when Windows has some problems, the BIOS shouldn't be affected that badly by some garbage on the harddrive, right?
And this garbage is actually valid data. I checked it on another Linux computer and two FAT16 partitions where correctly created:
/dev/sdb1   *        2048      206847      102400    6  FAT16
/dev/sdb2          206848   102399999    51096576    6  FAT16
I have no more idea what to try or what to do to get this Windows installed. It would be great if you could either help me or at least share your experiences if you saw something similar so that I know I am not alone and don't have to return the machine next week due to a hardware defect.
Thank you
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Answer 1

I just created a GPT on the disk including a 200MB FAT32 formatted EFI_SYSTEM partition. On it I put /boot/efi/shellx64.efi from the Tiano-project. No chance, as soon as anything but zeros is on the HDD, the BIOS/UEFI (I switched to UEFI-only for this) is simply hanging and causing a lot of hdd traffic. Getting into the one-time-boot-menu takes ages, selecting the HDD give a lot of traffic again and after a minute or so the one-time-boot-menu comes back.
I do not say it should boot the shell - I don't know UEFI enough for that up to now. But it should not takes minutes to find and search the HDD...