The last 6 hours have been apparently wasted.

I tried to recover Windows for somebody today on a Lenovo ThinkBook laptop. It was installed with some flavor of linux so it needed a full reinstall.

The Microsoft Windows 11 install media that you can download... it didn't work. It said it required a storage device driver (not an .exe one but an early one, which I don't have. It didn't recognize any of the drivers I supplied -- and I downloaded ALL the drivers for that system from Lenovo). Some online sites claim this is because the media burn process was incomplete, but I burned it to two different USB disks, and again to the first one, using 'dd' with flag=direct,sync and ran a 'sync' afterwards to be sure. I also verified the sha256 on the download and it matched.

So then I tried to find Lenovo's recovery media. They had it, but I needed to sign in to my account. So I needed to create that. That took about 30 minutes to create an account and log in as it kept redirecting wrongly and then thinking that I wasn't human. I tried several browsers. At one point I had to slide a slider to the marked position (which was poorly marked and much thinner than the slider), but every time I did it just slowly slid back to the left... unless I got just the right pixel which eventually I did. Finally I got it, but then it again said I had done too many tries and gave me the slider test again. After passing the slider test 5 times in a row it still didn't like me, so I tried yet another browser and finally got in.

Then instead of giving me a download, they gave me an .EXE. The FAQ then says it is not supported for linux. So I borrowed someone else's computer. Of course that .EXE required me to login so

I had to copy down and type my long random password.

Then it downloaded and burned to a USB and verified the burn. And I ejected cleanly.

Now the laptop in question does not recognize this USB as bootable. I tried multiple times from multiple USB ports.

I checked under linux and it has an /efi/boot directory, but in lowercase not uppercase, and maybe that is the issue. I'm not really excited about editing their recovery media to try uppercase.

Anyhow, my point is, avoid Lenovo. Horrible experience.