Thinkpad T14 (AMD) Gen 2 – A Brave New World!

As long-time readers of this blog are aware, I’m a bit of a Thinkpad fanatic. I fell in love with these durable machines when I was working for IBM back in the late 90’s and accidentally had one fall out of my bag, bounce down the jetway stairs and hit the runway hard – amazingly enough it had a few scuffs but zero damage! After the purchase of the brand by Lenovo, I was a bit worried, but they continue to crank out (at least in the Thinkpad T and X model lines) high-quality, powerful machines.

Thinkpad T480 – RIP

I ran into a nasty problem with my Thinkpad T480 where the software on the machine actually physically damaged the hardware. I know! I thought that was impossible too (other than the 70’s PET machine that had a software-controlled relay on the motherboard that you could trigger continuously until it burned out) but nope – the problem is real.

Essentially, the Thunderbolt I/O port on the machine is driven by firmware running out of an NVRAM chip on the motherboard that can be software-updated as new firmware comes out. As with any NVRAM chip, there are a finite number of write-cycles before the chip dies, but the number of times you will update your firmware is pretty small so it works out well.

Unfortunately, Lenovo pushed out a firmware update that wrote continuously to the NVRAM chip and if you didn’t patch fast enough (they did release an urgent/critical update), then the write-cycles would be exceeded, the chip would fail and the bring-up code would not detect the presence of the bus and thus you had no more Thunderbolt on the laptop. Well, I didn’t update fast enough so “boom” – it is now a Thunderbolt-less laptop.

The New T124 (AMD) Gen 2

Well, enter the need for a new laptop. I decided to jump ship from the Intel train and try life out on the “other side” but ordering a Thinkpad T14 (AMD) Gen 2 machine with 16gb of soldered RAM (there is a slot that I will be populating today that can take it up to 48gb max – I’m going with 32gb total by installing an $80 16gb DIMM) and the Ryzen Pro 5650U that has 6 cores and 12 threads of execution. The screen was a 1920×1080 400 nit panel and looks really nice.

When the laptop showed up, I booted the OpenBSD installer from 6.9-current and grabbed a dmesg and discovered that I lost the Lenovo lottery and had a Realtek WiFi card in the machine. Well, the good news was that I had upgraded the card in my T480 to an Intel AX200 so I swapped it for the one I took out of the T480 and then used it in the T14 to replace the Realtek card. Worked like a charm.

The Ethernet interface on this machine is a bit odd. It’s a Realtek chipset as well, but it shows up as two interfaces (re0 and re1). The deal is that re0 is the interface that is exposed when the machine is plugged into a side-connecting docking station and re1 is the interface that is connected to the built-in Ethernet port. The device driver code that is in 6.9-current as of this writing works just fine with it, however, so I’m happy.

Now for the bad news. Every Thinkpad I have owned for the last decade allows me to plug an m.2 2240 SATA drive into the WWAN slot and it works great. I assumed that would be the case with this machine. While I had the bottom off to replace the WiFi card, I slipped the 1TB drive from the WWAN slot of my T480 into the WWAN slot of the T14 and booted up. I was immediately presented with an error message stating effectively that the WWAN slot was white-listed by Lenovo and would only accept “approved” network cards. I was beyond frustrated by this.

Given that I want to get this machine into my production workflow, I decided that I’d slog along for the time being by putting a larger m.2 2280 NVMe drive in, installing rEFInd to allow me to boot multiple partitions from a single drive and then clone the 512gb drive that is in the machine to the 1GB drive out of the T480. Then, the remaining space on the new drive will contain an encrypted partition for my OpenBSD install.

Installing rEFInd

I followed the instructions from the rEFInd site on how to manually install under Windows 10 and the steps I followed included downloading and unpacking the ZIP file and then running the following commands from an administrative command prompt:

C:\Users\xxxx\Downloads\refind-bin-0.13.2\> mountvol R: /s
C:\Users\xxxx\Downloads\refind-bin-0.13.2\> xcopy /E refind R:\EFI\refind\
C:\Users\xxxx\Downloads\refind-bin-0.13.2\> r:
R:\> cd \EFI\refind
R:\EFI\refind\> del /s drivers_aa64
R:\EFI\refind\> del /s drivers_ia32
R:\EFI\refind\> del /s tools_aa64
R:\EFI\refind\> del /s tools_ia32
R:\EFI\refind\> del refind_aa64.efi
R:\EFI\refind\> del refind_x64.efi
R:\EFI\refind\> rmdir drivers_aa64
R:\EFI\refind\> rmdir drivers_ia32
R:\EFI\refind\> rmdir tools_aa64
R:\EFI\refind\> rmdir tools_ia32R:\EFI\refind\> rename refind.conf-sample refind.conf
R:\EFI\refind\> mkdir images
R:\EFI\refind\> copy C:\Users\xxx\Pictures\mtstmichel.jpg images
R:\EFI\refind\> bcdedit /set "{bootmgr}" path \EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi

That next to the last line is because I wanted to have a picture of my “happy place” (Mount Saint Michel off of the northern coast of France) as the background for rEFInd. I edited the refind.conf file and added the following lines:

banner images\mtstmichel.jpg
banner_scale fillscreen

A quick reboot shows that rEFInd is installed correctly and has my customized background. Don’t be alarmed that the first time you boot up with rEFInd is slow, I think it is doing some scanning and processing and caching because the second and subsequent boots are faster.

Cloning the Drives

The process that I am going to follow, at a high level, is to first clone the contents of my primary 1TB 2280 NVMe drive in my T480 to a spare 256GB drive. I will then erase the 1TB drive and clone the contents of my T14’s drive to it (it’s only 512GB). I will then erase the 512GB drive and clone the 256GB drive back to it. Finally, for good operational security (OpSec) purposes, I’ll use the open source Windows program Eraser erase the 256GB drive. At this point I should have a bootable T480 (with a fried Thunderbolt bus – grr…) on the 512GB drive, and a bootable T14 on the 1TB drive.

I’m using Clonezilla, an open source tool that I burn to a bootable USB drive to do the cloning. For hardware that I am using to accomplish all of this, first I use a Star Tech device that allows me to plug m.2 drives into a little box that then acts as a 2.5 inch SSD drive. I plug that into a Wavlink USB drive docking station that can hold either 3.5″ or 2.5″ drives.

Another piece of software that I use as part of this process is GPartEd Live – an open source tool that allows you to create a USB drive that boots into the GPartEd software (the Gnu Partition Editor). This allows me to view the partition structure of one drive and create an analagous partition structure on another drive. The built-in tools for Windows to do this work (Disk Manager for example) can create hidden partitions under the covers that can cause problems with this process. I prefer to use GPartEd to ensure that I can see and control everything that is going on.

Step One is to take the T480, boot it into Windows and connect the Wavlink device to it with the 256GB NVMe drive plugged into it via the StarTech adapter. While I’m using Eraser to wipe the 256GB drive, I also go into Windows settings and decrypt the Windows disk by turning off BitLocker for it. This may not be necessary but it makes me feel more comfortable to do the cloning with unencrypted Windows drives because the key for the encryption is store in the TPM device on the motherboard and I’m not sure if the fact that the underlying hardware changes would muck that up. After the erase and decrypt is finished, I shrank the partition using “Disk Management” on Windows to be smaller than the new physical disk. If you don’t do this, then Clonezilla won’t allow you to clone from a larger partition to a smaller one.

Next we will need to reboot the machine to GPartEd Live. For the destination drive, you will need to use the “Device” menu and create a new GPT partition table. Take a look at the source drive and make a note of the various partitions, their flags, and their sizes. On the destination drive, recreate that partition structure with the same flags and the same or slightly larger size. I generally bump up the size of the partition by just a bit in order to avoid getting into trouble with rounding the size for display on the screen. If you get it wrong, don’t worry, Clonezilla will yell at you and you’ll have to go back and do this over again. 🙂

When launching Clonezilla, since I have the high resolution display on the T480 (a mistake I’ll never make again, HiDPI is a PITA in everything but Windows) I had to use my cell phone to zoom in on the microscopic text and select the “use 800×600 with large fonts from RAM” option. With readable text, I then make sure that I’m choosing “device-device” from the first menu (not the default). Next, select “Beginner Mode” to reduce the complexity of the choices you’ll have to make. After that, you want to select “part_to_local_part” to clone from one partition on the source drive to the corresponding partition on the destination drive. Finally, select the source partition and the destination partition. I recommend you do the smaller partitions first and then let the main C: partition (the largest one) grind because it can take a long time to clone.

After cloning the T480 drive, I removed it from the machine and was ready to clone the T14’s drive to it. This is where I ran into a “keying” problem with m.2 drives. Some are “B” keyed, and some are “B+M” keyed. This refers to the number of cutouts where they plug into the slot. Well, it looks like the NVMe drives in both the T480 and the T14 don’t fit the StarTech adapter. After some juggling around I found an old 256MB drive that I was able to use to get the swap completed.

Creating the OpenBSD Partition

To do this, I will use “Disk Manager” on Windows and shrink the NTFS partition (if necessary) to make room for OpenBSD and then create a new partition on the drive that takes up the remaining space. If you check the “don’t assign a drive letter” box and the “don’t format the partition” box, you’ll get a raw, unformatted partition that takes up the remaining space on the disk.

That new raw partition will be changed in OpenBSD to be the home of the encrypted slice on which I’ll be installing the operating system. After creating that partition, it’s time to download the 6.9-current .IMG file for the latest snapshot and use Rufus on Windows to create the USB drive and reboot from it.

Once in the OpenBSD installer, drop immediately to the shell and convert that NTFS partition into an OpenBSD partition. That will be where we we put the encrypted slice that we will be installing to. To do this, run the following commands:

# cd /dev
# sh ./MAKEDEV sd0
# fdisk -E sd0

sd0: 1> print
sd0: 1> edit 4
Partition id: A6
Partition offset <ENTER>
Partition size <ENTER>Partition name: OpenBSD
sd0*: 1> write
sd0: 1> exit

The print command above should show you the 4 partitions on your drive (the EFI partition, the Windows partition, the WindowsRecovery partition and your fourth partition that will hold OpenBSD that you created above).

Now that you have a partition for OpenBSD, you’ll want to copy the EFI bootloader over to your EFI drive. You’ll later make a configuration change in rEFInd to not only display it on the screen, but also show a cool OpenBSD “Puffy” logo for it!

# cd /dev
# sh ./MAKEDEV sd1
# mount /dev/sd1i /mnt
# mkdir /mnt2
# mount /dev/sd0i /mnt2
# mkdir /mnt2/EFI/OpenBSD
# cp /mnt/efi/boot/* /mnt2/EFI/OpenBSD
# umount /mnt
# umount /mnt2

Now that you have an OpenBSD EFI bootloader in its own directory on the EFI partition, you’ll want to create the encrypted slice for the operating system install:

# disklabel -E sd0

sd0> a a
sd0> offset: <ENTER>
sd0> size: <ENTER>
sd0> FS type: RAID
sd0*> w
sd0> q

# bioctl -c C -l sd0a softraid0
New passphrase: <your favorite passphrase>
Re-type passphrase: <your favorite passphrase>

Pay attention to the virtual device name that bioctl spits out for your new encrypted “drive”. That’s what you will tell the OpenBSD installer to use. To re-enter the installer, type “exit” at the command prompt. Do your install of the operating system as you normally do. When you reboot, go into Windows.

First, download an icon for OpenBSD from here (or pick your favorite elsewhere). Next, bring up an administrative command prompt and use the following commands to mount the EFI partition and add the icon for OpenBSD:

C:\Windows\system32> mountvol R: /s
C:\Windows\system32> r:
R:> cd \EFI\refind
R:\EFI\refind> copy "C:\Users\<YOUR USER>\Download\495_openbsd_icon.png" icons\os_openbsd.png

Save your changes, exit notepad and then reboot. rEFInd is smart enough to find your OpenBSD partition and use the icon you just added. When you select it from the rEFInd UI, you should be presented with your OpenBSD encrypted disk password and be able to boot for the first time. I ran into a weird thing with my snapshot where it couldn’t download the firmware. I formatted a USB thumb drive as FAT32, downloaded the amdgpu, iwx, uvideo and vmm firmware from the site, mounted the drive in my OpenBSD system and ran fw_update -p /mnt to get the firmware.

At this point, you should be able to reboot and select either Windows or OpenBSD from your rEFInd interface. My hope is that Lenovo will remove this absurd white-listing of the WWAN devices from their UEFI/BIOS code and I’ll be able to plug drives into it again; however, if (and this is more likely) they do not, I’ll at some point buy a 2TB m.2 NVMe drive for this machine, repeat this process and be able to add Linux to it.

I hope folks find this guide helpful.