Lenovo m93p will no longer boot, from hard drive, or usb drives

Question

So i have 2 drives here, 480gb ssd and a 500gb 2.5inch 7200rpm drive, and i have 3 usb drives here,

Lenovo thinkcenter m93p is the pc, 4th gen i5, 16gb ram, worked every day until i tried to install windows 10, i had batocera and used it as a games console

• usb drive 1 - Ventoy, has all my linux and windows installs
• usb drive 2 - Windows 10 media creation tool installer
• usb drive 3 - Rufus windows 10 installer

(The brands differ and the 2nd drive is brand new, lexar, kingston and sandisk for anyone wondering)

Uefi bootable and even tried with legacy csm option and secure boot disabled, so boot machine and try to boot from usb....and nothing, black screen when uefi selected, and blinking line with legacy (tried both option in the bios, and disabled secure boot so the rufus and ventoy ones work as planned.

I cant get linux distros either which is super odd. Even tried my backup drive with my windows 10 install from my laptop and still wouldn't boot. (standard sata 2.5inch drive)

Reset the bios to default, tried disabling optimize for operating systems, changed the boot orders, cleared the cmos. disabled vt-d as some forums suggested. Nothing works, i get a black screen or flashing cursor, left it for 20 mins or so to see if it was just slow. But no. Tried every usb port thinking it was maybe a specific one to do it... nope.

Im kinda at a loss. Anyone has this before. All usb drives work on my pc and laptop for booting from, as do the hard drives in caddies. The machine is recognizing them but just not going forward, and i assume its a stupid bios setting im missing somewhere.

Also if i let it boot from the sata drive, any of them i just get a flashing cursor, even with everything disabled bar it in the boot menu options

Answer 1

I had the same issue with my Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p. No matter what I tried, nothing would boot. Either get a blinking cursor for CSM or a black screen for UEFI.

I had tried everything the OP mentioned too, but also a BIOS update, but nothing would boot.

The solution: Update the BIOS in CMOS recovery mode.

1. Download the latest BIOS update from Lenovo for your PC model (on another working Windows PC).
   • Get the CD version: "Flash UEFI BIOS update (CD ISO image version)"
2. Open the .ISO you just downloaded (Windows Explorer can open ISOs)
3. Inside the .ISO you'll find a .IMG file. For me, it was called 9SJT9CA.IMG
4. Use rufus to put it on an empty USB flash drive. (no settings need to be changed in rufus, most options should be disabled anyway)
5. Once rufus is done, safely eject the USB drive and put it into your Lenovo PC.
6. Turn off the Lenovo PC, unplug power, open the case and locate the Clear CMOS / Recovery jumper and change the jumper over to the maintenance position.
   • For detailed instructions on how to do this, check your PC's manual. You can find your manual on Lenovo's support page, in the "How To's" section, it's usually called a "User Guide". (I've embedded a screenshot of my instructions for an M92p at the very bottom of this answer)
7. Once you've switched the jumper to maintenance position close the case, plug the power back (make sure your USB drive is plugged in), and power on the PC.
8. You shouldn't need to press anything on the keyboard, it should detect the USB drive automatically and start installing the update.
   • It'll take 1-3 minutes then automatically turn the PC off.
9. Now unplug the power again, open the case, and do in reverse step 6. (put the CMOS jumper back to normal position.)
10. Once the case is closed again, unplug the BIOS update USB drive and plugin whatever you want to boot off.
11. Power on the PC, keep pressing F12 to get to the boot menu and select your USB drive to boot from and it should now boot from it.

• Also, in my case, I already had a working Windows 10 install, it just wouldn't boot due to a BIOS bug, and once I turned on the PC after the recovery BIOS update, it just booted into Windows 10 that was on the internal SSD.

That's it. That's what fixed my blinking/black screen issue anyway. Let me know how you get on if you still have the issue.

PS, thanks for the guys trying to help me / original OP (we are not the same person) after I offered bounty, unfortunately I mistakenly offered too much and fell below 50 points and couldn't reply to any questions.

Answer 2

I had an issue like this before, In my case it was a faulty RAM stick. Once I replaced it everything went back to normal. Not saying that's it in you case but it's just worth a try to start eliminating hardware (divide & conquer) and see if anything might be causing this issue or as stated above you can flash new BIOS.