I had previously gotten the Thinkpad 13 to boot from an Arch Linux live USB, but while installing it, I made the awful mistake of accidentally formatting the Windows System partition.

From there, I downloaded a Windows 10 64 bit .iso, burned it onto a separate USB, and attempted to boot from it in order to attempt system recovery. Hopefully that will work.

Regardless, when selecting "USB HDD: PNY USB 3.0 FD" from the boot menu, the screen simply flashes and then remains unchanged.

Secure boot is off, and this option is at the top of the boot order.

How can I boot from this USB?

Hi sudoaptgetrekt,

Warm Greetings & welcome to Lenovo Community, happy to have you here.

As I understand that you have query regarding your ThinkPad 13 is not booting from USB device

I believe you have to Disable the UEFI boot option & select Legacy BIOS mode to boot it from USB media

I hope the above information helped you.

Please feel free to post in Lenovo Community Forums if you have any further queries!

Regards,
Prabhansh
_______________________________________________
Tap that Kudos button if I helped.
If you find a post helpful and it answers your question, please mark it as an "Accepted Solution"!

No experience with any Lenovo (xEFI BIOS, from the sounds of it), but I do know that there are MANY kinds of Windows 10 ISO.

If that USB can be used to boot another system (like it quite possibly can), then perhaps you'll have to use a partition program boot DVD/USB to set up the HDD first.

I can't recommend you one because Linux ones format NTFS slightly differently (with the starting sector) than the Windows programs and the Windows ones - you'll have to know if you want your HDD to have regular partitions, or if you want to have it as GPT and -also- your boot partition has to have flags set to it: active, boot...

The Windows ISO can do this automagically through its setup, BUT I've no idea whether you Lenovo had some hidden recovery partitions (used to restore Windows with, like, a companion DVD - or, whatever the factory options were before Arch murdered 'em :))

So, I'm guessing that you could try to (somehow, hehe) dig up Lenovo recovery - if it's still there - by, maybe, using a partition program to look for that partition and set it as active and boot (possibly having to set back the Windows one later, if you're successful; don't know how their recovery would work), or wipe the whole HDD and set up the boot partition; or, if you have data on a separate partition - just see what's going on with the drive and make a plan from there.

In any case, weigh your options carefully, not like with Arch. What I do with XUbuntu, by the way, is free up partition space at the end of the drive - without initialising it, or formatting - and their installer can recognize this and gives the option to "Install alongside of Windows" and it replaces the Windows bootloader with grub2 which, then, gives the startup options to boot to Win, or Linux. (X)Ubuntu is also GNU Linux, like Arch and it's a much easier distro - despite of some of their shady practices. Its Xfce shell is well developed and it flies (much like Arch would've), anyway.

Makes sense? I hope that some of this info helps!

Lol, ok, or what Prabhansh said. xD