On Tuesday evening, after a great presentation at WIX Lounge in NYC, my almost 2 year old Gen 3 Lenovo X1 Carbon running Windows 10 did an automatic update to Windows 10 Redstone. I didn’t ask for this. It just happened. And when I sat down at my desk on Wednesday morning the laptop was “bricked”. Nothing but a black screen. No logo. No lights. Nothing. It wouldn’t turn on for anything. Luckily I have a Dell Workstation that I use for huge tasks behind my desk so I just cursed like hell and went on with my day.
Thursday afternoon, I decided that the bricked laptop was a good excuse to upgrade to a new laptop and Lenovo had just released the X1 Yoga. Perfect. So I hopped on a MetroNorth train from CT and went to B&H Photo in Manhattan (the only place you can buy one of these at retail) and walked out 45 minutes later with a brand new Lenovo X1 Yoga.
I love that new laptop smell. And this one came with all the goodness of my X1 Carbon except it has a bigger drive, more memory and a touchscreen that I can draw on. Plus, when you fold the screen over, it turns into a nice tablet. It weighs less than my Gen 3 Carbon and get’s twice the battery life.
LOVED IT.
That is until this morning when one of the software packages I was installing said I had to restart to complete the installation. The restart triggered the Windows 10 Redstone update and voila – instant bricked computer.
Apparently this is a known issue with Lenovo laptops. They don’t know why this is happening, but they know about it and are working on a fix. In the meantime, there is a workaround:
Workaround
- Hold the power button for several seconds to turn the system off first.
- Once the machine is turned off, Press the power button to turn the system back on and press the Enter key or F12 to display the startup menu. Next, select F1 to enter BIOS setup area.
- Change the following settings to these values:
- Select Security -> Secure Boot -> Disabled
- Main menu -> Startup -> UEFI/Legacy Boot – > Both
- Press F10 to save and Exit
There is also a thread on the subject on a Microsoft discussion forum here.
