On Sun, Mar 08, 2020 at 11:14:02PM -0500, gregrwm wrote: > bought a thinkpad e540 from free geek Typing this email on such a laptop now. > $100 seemed decent even with a missing key, a couple dings on the case, can't > open the optical drive, and when it sleeps it won't wake up. Yes i had this problem. And a BIOS update did help. > the lenovo > site has this bios iso and doc (tho i gained nothing from reading it). > inserting a cd is a no go. but you'd think i ought to be able to boot via > grub, right? You can probably use a USB stick instead of a CD. Try just writing the iso to the USB stick. dd if=e540firmwarej9uj28wd.iso of=/dev/sdb and then see if it will boot. FYI: This laptop has a small M2 slot you can insert an SSD into. The official Lenovo documentation says an SSD placed into this slot should only be used for Microsofts way of caching the spinning rust HD, not as an independent disk. But it works fine as a standalone disk. I've had my root filesystem on it all the time i've had the machine. And it gives a significant performance boost. Andrew