Today I unboxed my new Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16ARX8H 82WSCTO1WW with RTX 4090. Together with it I bought a WD BLACK SN850X 2TB SSD.
The evening went as follows:
- Opened up the laptop and installed the new SSD in the free slot.
- Booted up the computer successfully (first time trying).
- Upon completing the OOBE (windows 11 was preinstalled), I opened disk management to set up the new SSD since it did not show up in file explorer. Asked to choose between GPT and MBR, I chose GPT; formatted the drive as NTFS; created a simple volume.
- I created an installation media on a 64GB flash drive (on another computer), since my intention was to install windows on the new 2TB drive.
- Shut down the computer from start menu.
- The screen went dark, but the keyboard kept glowing and the fans were on. It was hanging like this for some time (first weird sign).
- Since I intended to reinstall everything after, I figured a force-shutdown using the button wouldn't be bad, and I did that (was this a mistake??)
- I put the installation media flash in, booted, entered BIOS on first try; select the boot order to have the flash first, exit and boot. I believe I also turned off the feature of always-on USB, because I don't need that and wanted to kill two birds with one stone.
- The windows installation screen appears (the old-fashioned one). After selecting languages, I formatted all the drives and partitions, then deleted them all and created new ones. I selected the new 2TB drive to install windows; the process copied the files, did all the setting up and automatically restarted.
- As I assumed everything to be fine at this point I did not look at the screen, but there was nothing like a BSOD. When I looked at the screen, the computer seemed to be in a boot loop. The "legion" logo would appear with a loading wheel. Then it would go dark for a second and reappear. After a couple of rotations, the loading wheel gets stuck and after some time the screen goes dark and repeats this. When the "legion" logo appears for the first time it is possible to enter BIOS using F2.
- I tried to google for answers, one of them suggested recalibrating the system clock. It was a few seconds behind so I did it (was this a mistake??)
- Tried booting, but it just looped again.
- I repeated the booting from flash and windows installation process using the same USB flash drive doing everything exactly the same.
- Now I'm looking at the screen, and after the automatic restart at the end of the installation, at first the "legion" logo appears with the loading wheel and text underneath. The text changes, but eventually the wheel gets stuck on "Getting devices ready 66%".
- After a few seconds the computer gets a BSOD with the code CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT; restarts into the boot loop as before
- At this point I returned to BIOS, changed all the settings back to the defaults just in case and tried to boot from the flash again, recreating the installation media fresh on my other computer beforehand.
- This time I choose the old SSD that was in the computer before (and from which the default installation booted) as the designated OS drive to rule out a faulty SSD.
- After the "Preparing files" part is complete, I remove the flash drive just in case, but the computer BSODs after restart and "getting devices ready" just as before.
I have no idea what to do, or where the problem is lying. The internet suggests a processor error from the BSOD message, but what caused it? Since it booted into windows at first, the processor was working when I got the computer out of the box I suppose.
