I hadn't seen my dad for a whole year - God have mercy on my lazy ass - and now that I was going to see him, he asked me to help him factory reset his laptop (some Lenovo running Microslop). He could've done it by himself technically speaking, but he knows that I'm knowledgeable when it comes to tech, so why not.
Oh. My. FUCKING. God.
I hadn't "used" Microslop Shitdows for five or so years, Windows 10 at the time. I had been following some news - and posts here too - so I knew to expect some bullshit, but...
- It doesn't let you install without an internet connection PERIOD. I even disabled the wireless NIC in the hopes that it would let me USE THE COMPUTER THAT MY DAD HAD PAID FOR but no. "Install drivers" or "contact support", it said.
- It doesn't accept CLI hotkeys. Mkay...
- It (being Lenovo in collaboration with Microslop, I guess, not Microslop on its own) doesn't allow you to boot from a USB stick. I imaged a USB stick with a Windows 10 ISO, even bought an activation key at Kinguin, but no. Just no. The BIOS doesn't let you to change boot order, the recovery mode - EVEN THOUGH IT HAS THE OPTION TO BOOT FROM REMOVABLE MEDIA - simply jumps back to the stock installation upon choosing "boot from USB".
- Finally, after giving up and connecting to the internet, setting up a fake account, it wouldn't let me proceed unless I turned off my VPN.
Only after having been force fed the Microslop setup, I finally was able to nuke it with Cris Titus' Windows utility and then setup an offline account.
At least my dad is happy with the laptop. That's all that matters. I gave him Librewolf with uBlock and Libre Office. And mad respect for him saying before point four above, that he'll let me slap Linux onto it if nothing else works. 🩵 Which of course wouldn't work since booting from removable media is disabled in the firmware, but still. Love you dad. 🩷
Rant over.
PS: he did give me permission to unscrew the bottom and have a look inside, so I will try to replace the SSD (if it's M.2) and possibly flash Libreboot if the model is among their officially supported laptops.
Didn’t say it wasn’t bootable, but built incorrectly. In this case, using dd. I’ve seen the same results even using the official USB creation tool from Microsoft, but for whatever reason, Rufus always works. I’d just suggest building the media a different way without using dd.
The other thing you can do, since it sounds like you can still boot into Windows on his PC, is to use the Reset This PC process. That will download the media, nuke the drive and delete all the user data (you can choose to keep it also), and reinstall Windows to an out-of-box state.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t let you leverage the Rufus tools that will automatically turn off system requirements, or create a local user, at USB creation time. Offers way more than using just straight dd.
Example from another site’s article: