I have searched this and several other forums for answers to my problem.  I have a Lenovo W520 i7 12G Ram laptop with a new blank OCZ vertex 4 drive.  I can not get past the first reboot during the install.  Many times I can't get to the first reboot.  I have tried all of the different video settings in the bios, I have updated the system bios, and generally tried everything I can come up with to no avail.  I have tried different versions of the OS (regular and enterprise both dated 8-15) I have tried loading from DVD and USB, I have tried with no other drives in laptop, I have tried all SATA options in bios and all video options in bios.

Sometimes, it freezes immediately during the start of install with a slanted blue windows logo and a single dot at the bottom of the screen.  Sometimes I get up to 3 dots before it freezes.  In about 1 out of ten tries it will actually finish the cd and restart.  Once I get here about half of the time I have a blank screen.  The other half of the time I get the slanted blue window but nothing else.  But in both cases, the CPU fan runs wide open.

I guess my questions are:

1. How close is the 8/15 download the 'to be released' OS?

2. Has anyone actually gotten W8 to run on this hardware config?  (After over 30 years of alpha and beta testing I would consider the current code to be a late alpha or early beta based on my experience)

3. Where do I go from here?  Should I just accept that this and possibly other high-end laptops like it won't run the newest OS?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Dear tgeddings,

Did you cross checked the SHA1 values against the MSDN Subscriptions page with your downloaded ISO. Make sure your downloaded ISO is not corrupted. I can understand that your laptop is brand new and when did you purchased? Windows 8 RTM released on August 15, 2012 but it should have updates atleast till June-July 2012.

Regards,
prathaprabhu

1) RTM ISO = Technet = Same as what's being printed on retail DVD's.   The difference in waiting for retail is that Microsoft will be releasing it's first W8 patches next Tuesday, and more on the 2nd Tuesday in Oct.   Sometimes they even drop unannounced patches on the street date.

OEM's don't have to support W8 until the late Oct, it offers them no real benefit to rush patches for the few technet subscribers affected.  What did the lenovo website say about Windows 8 support on this model, I'm sure they will want to hear about this issue if they haven't already. 

I have installed W8 x64 Enterprise ENG w/o problems on my W520 (4284) with 16GB RAM and an Intel SSD 320.

I upgraded the BIOS to the latest regular version (1.38) not the one on the beta driver page (1.37a). I have set the SATA controller to "AHCI", the graphics device to "NVIDIA Optimus" and the boot mode to "UEFI only". I had to use a DVD for installation as the machine did boot from an USB stick only in BIOS mode and I wanted UEFI mode. During installation I used the advanced option and deleted all partitions from the SSD. The installer formatted the disk as GPT disk and created 3 partitions (a 100MB boot partition w/ FAT32, a 300MB recovery tools partition and the C: partition).

After the OS installation completed I installed the W8 beta drivers from the Lenovo site. They are obviously really only "beta".

The power management SW behaves very strangely and does not seem to do anything useful.

The blue FN keys do not work but some of their functionality can be used by launching their respective setting program directly via Explorer.

The UMTS modem drivers get installed each time resuming from sleep but the modem does not show up in the "Networks" sidebar and therefor I was not able to get a connection up and running.

But putting those issues aside the machine works very well, the OS seems to be faster than W7 and the memory footprint is smaller.

• Edited by JSp42 Saturday, September 08, 2012 9:11 AM

Hi,

Please check if the method in the following post helps:

Windows 8 Setup screen won't start
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itproinstall/thread/5b537b4e-0358-4526-b515-30fbe6028770

Thanks.

Thanks for the replies, however I am now deader than ever.  I had the 1.37a bios for windows 8 beta, so I upgraded to 1.38 per the post above.  No difference.  I have repaired/refreshed/etc. for the 14th time - nothing.  If it were April I would assume Windows 8 was an April fools joke.  We have a number of these laptops, should I just assume that W8 won't run on them?  What really amazes me is that when it fails to boot there is no fall-back.  You can do the shift-F8 to force it to give you options on the next boot, but no matter what option you select you get nothing but a blank display.  I can't even get safe mode with a a command prompt.  I have just unboxed another new SSD drive to try again.  The only way I was ever to get it to install the first time was by blind luck and trying every possible bios and install option over about 40 installs.  It did run for two days even thought the metro tiles did quit updating the second day.  I made the foolish mistake of uninstalling hyper-v and since then the laptop is a brick.

I have tried the detailed steps above but no difference.  Does anyone have anymore suggestions?

I offer no advice, just consolation that I have the same problem on my W520 with it installing OK, but after all that it gets stuck on the slanted windows afterwards.

If it were any advice then just go back to Windows 7 and hope the Win8 upgrade goes smoothly at the end of October and if it doesn't then at least you can bug IBM more about it.

I've had the same problem, tried various BIOS versions, settings, and drivers.  I have noticed if I reboot a few times, it will eventually boot through the problem and start and run just fine.  It always hangs VERY early in the boot process, right after the slanted windows 8 logo appears, but before any spinning dots show up.

I'm personally suspecting some BIOS issue with the SSD in this machine.

• Proposed as answer by TurtleTech Monday, December 03, 2012 9:43 PM

As I read this thread I fear that Win8 just isn't to be with the W520. I started reading this thread in the hope that it would solve my W520, but alas.

So far Win8 has crashed fatally on me 3 times. First time was an update from Win7 after which the laptop worked for a couple of days; then after a windows update it couldn't get past the new logo, and claimed that it was also unable to restore. After that I've had 2 clean installs, which both have come to a grinding halt after an critical update.

I found a fix for this on another forum, and so far it's fixed my issues.  

Go into the BIOS and set it to boot "Legacy Only" (no UEFI), and go into the Virtualization settings and turn off VT-d (virtualized I/O).

I'd tried every other setting, various BIOS versions, all the Nvida Optimus stuff, and no luck, it would still hang on restart.  Changing those things above has fixed my issues.  Optimus works fine, and everything else seems to be working great now.  Good luck!

• Proposed as answer by sbff Thursday, October 09, 2014 1:29 PM

I have been struggling with the installation process whole day today and yesterday, but finally realized that when removing the SD card from my Dell XT2 laptop made the installation process work just fine. Earlier it was with snail pace

I did also try to switch the SATA settings, but the real problem with me was the SD card. Without it no problem.

I was unable to boot Windows 8 setup on my W520, and it seemed turning off VT-d in the bios Virtualization settings did the trick for me.  I was able to boot using UEFI Only without issue.  I set the graphics to Nvidia Optimus and OS detection to enabled.

Once I was in Windows 8 the default graphics drivers were incredibly unstable with two monitors.  I downloaded the latest NVidia drivers and things are much better now.

After rebooting, in device manager, I had:

- unrecognised Base System Device (Ricoh Media Card Reader Driver)

- and Unknown device (Lenovo Power Management Driver)

Installing the drivers from support.lenovo.com fixed these.

the ONLY mistake here is even considering to use a half baked pile of code named Windows 8 on a machine as wonderful as Thinkpad W520 workstation. Microsoft may claim to be 'enterprise compatible' with its latest excuse of a tablet disease infected in-operating 'operating' system, but ignoring the flagship workstation laptop of the most widely used enterprise friendly laptop vendor speaks for their utter incompetence.

The fix to this problem is to revert to win 7, the only usable MS operating system after XP...

I use a Lenovo V370 laptop, and I just have tried to install Windows 8 on it with a USB several days ago.

The main steps:

1. Create a Window 8 USB installation disc

2. Set laptop to boot from the USB disc

3. Install Windows 8 following steps one by one on the program

I think the most difficult steps to install the OS with a USB is setting the laptop to boot from the USB. I pressed my Lenovo laptop Boot Menu Key (F12) repeatedly when I saw the Lenovo logo appears.

When the Boot Menu comes up, I select the USB device and press Enter to boot my laptop.

• Edited by billclintonmi Wednesday, September 11, 2013 2:21 AM

"turn off VT-d" works!

Thanks a lot.

For all those searching - and after much experimentation, I can say that turning off VT-d was important to getting Windows 10 stable on my W520.