I recently had to install Windows 8 from scratch on a new hard drive for a Lenovo laptop

[G+_Stephen Hart]

I recently had to install Windows 8 from scratch on a new hard drive for a Lenovo laptop.  I did it 7 times starting from a freshly formatted disk but it would always put 3 or 4 custom partitions on the disk and Windows 8 would have problems including that it could not fully shut down or restart without holding the power button down for 8 seconds (which I knew the user of the laptop would not do and it would run the battery down).

 

I did lots of checking on Lenovo boards and found that this is also a problem when installing Windows 7 from scratch.  They had lots of recipes about using "bootrec" with various parameters but that never worked.

 

The way I solved this was to use a plain desktop that had SATA ports and install Windows 8 there, but stay disconnected from the internet and don't activate it. Place it back into the laptop, then activate Windows there and it works fine and allows a full shutdown. 

 

Maybe do a segment about installing windows from scratch on a laptop and the various problems that can happen like getting drivers from the manufacturer and setting up the hard drive. I found that Dell often makes it easy with a big file containing all the drivers together.  Panasonic Toughbooks are good for supplying drivers too. For people buying laptops on ebay, it is good to know which ones have good driver support.

 

Also, there's a trick to doing a full image backup to a local USB drive once you are happy with the install. Windows doesn't like you to use a USB drive because they were scared it wouldn't be big enough for the image, which is about 18 GB after a full Win8 install (so you need a 32 GB drive).  The trick is to share the USB drive over your local network, then

Control Panel

File History

System Image Backup

Choose "On a Network Location" and go through the network to the USB disk that you just shared. 

It will now let you do a system backup to the USB disk.

[G+_Joshua Hamlett]

Lenovo supplies their drivers to you in two different convenient ways. If you are just installing on one or two computers, you can use ThinkVantage System Update. For WDS or other tools, you can us their Update Retriever tool to download and export all the drivers for the models you select.

 

Personally, I have found HP and Lenovo to have the best driver support, as they provide drivers for upgraded copies of windows even on older machines. Dell only supports what originally would have come on the computer, e.g., Vista 32-bit.