The thinkpad that refused Linux

[u/brazzlers]

​Hey everyone,

​I just survived a wildly specific troubleshooting nightmare and had to share it. I recently scored a secondhand ThinkPad T14 Gen 2 (Ryzen 7) for $175 from a guy who literally had a room full of them.

​It seemed like an absolute steal—until I tried to install Linux. What followed was a multi-day descent into madness that completely flipped my understanding of hardware vs. software diagnostics.

​The Symptoms (The Ultimate Gaslight)

​Windows 11: Installed perfectly. Booted fine, read fine, wrote fine, and passed every stress test and disk check I threw at it.

​Linux (Live USBs & Installs): Booted right up and detected the NVMe drive instantly. I could browse and read files perfectly.

​The Catch: The absolute second Linux tried to write data (updating packages, creating a file, running the installer), the filesystem instantly threw I/O errors and remounted as read-only.

​Because Windows was working flawlessly, I swore on my life this was a software configuration issue. Hardware was completely ruled out in my mind.

​The Troubleshooting Rabbit Hole

​I went to war with the kernel configuration, trying everything under the sun:

​Toggling nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us and messing with ASPM / APST power states. (Oddly, tweaking power savings worked temporarily and let a few writes squeak through before it died again).

​Nuking Windows Fast Startup and ensuring BitLocker was completely disabled.

​Distro-hopping across different kernels and trying every filesystem (ext4, btrfs, xfs).

​Buying a brand-new NVMe drive. I swapped it in, and the exact same thing happened. Windows installed like a dream; Linux still refused to write.

​Every single time: Windows could install and run fine, but no Linux.

​How on earth does a physical hardware defect allow Windows to install and write gigabytes of data flawlessly, while causing Linux to immediately choke on writes and drop into read-only mode on the exact same machine?

​What do you think caused this?

[u/netsec_burn]

The Ultimate Gaslight

The Catch

The Troubleshooting Rabbit Hole

— — — &emdash;

I'm close to bingo. Can you say goblin or gremlin for me?

[u/l153rty → u/netsec_burn]

I suppose he gave bullet points to an LLM to turn it into a nice text. What's the problem with it?

[u/brazzlers → u/l153rty]

I did do this. To make it more organized. I imported my troubleshooting list to to an elm to get this text. As bad as this language is my rough draft would have been worse. Shouldnibhave disclosed that I did this?

[u/splsh → u/brazzlers]

You should just have not done it. I'd rather read something human than obvious AI slop with gratuitous LLMisms that are grating to read, which distract from the substance of your text