Today I offered to help a friend with their new Lenovo S205 which they’d bought a year or so previously, but not got around to using. It had come pre-installed with both Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10 but wasn’t quite behaving properly.
I thought the easiest option would be to start again, with a nice clean install of Ubuntu 12.04.04 LTS. I attached my trusty USB flash drive, and…
….corrupted display, and no boot.
It turns out you can’t press F12 at boot time, and choose to boot from the USB media in the list that appears. No. You have to go into the boot settings proper, and put the USB media at the top of the list. That was Bug number 1.
So, off goes the install of Ubuntu. All looks good, WiFi working, hotkeys etc… time to reboot and…
….nope. PXE boot ROM kicks in instead. Check the boot settings. Yep, hard drive set to boot before other things, but doesn’t.
Back to booting from USB…. Fiddle with grub settings. No go. OK, re-install with manual choice of partitions…. still no go…. fiddle fiddle…. hours pass…
Finally I notice the drive has an MS-DOS type partition table, despite it booting EFI-style to the previous Ubuntu installs, so I decide to delete it and create a GPT one instead. Still nada…. Add an *empty* EFI partition… re-install… nope…. delete all partitions again…re-install… Voila!
(I’ve no idea which step was the magic one either. Bug number 2.)
So, now Ubuntu booted quite happily, but no WiFi. No worries. Attach an Ethernet cable and let it pull down latest drivers…
…but hang on, it has them all.
Poke about in the terminal for a while and realise the wireless is ‘hard’ blocked. But the wireless switch on the side is in the on position. Moving it disables Bluetooth. Moving it back enables Bluetooth. Still no WiFi, but at least the switch works! Everything driver wise seems to check out. The laptop is adamant that WiFi is disabled by hardware switch. Google. More Google.
What? Seriously?
Yup. On the Lenovo S205, WiFi will not function properly unless….
…the hard disk is the first entry in the boot menu!
Bug number 3, and I hit it because of Bug number 1…
Still, all’s well that ends well, but I never want to see another Lenovo S205 again!
4 replies on “The Weirdest Bug – Lenovo Ideapad S205”
Thanks for this article, really helped me with the installation on an old S205.
I was asking myself why I could not boot from USB with F12, no matter what I did…
Changing the boot priority from BIOS did the trick.
Cheers!
Glad to have helped!
Thanks for the article. This has saved me many hours of debugging, especially the boot priority one! greetings from germany
Glad it helped you. It took me ages to get to the bottom of the boot priority thing!