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Showing posts from July, 2016

Update Lenovo ThinkPad SSD Firmware through MDT

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As SSD drives become more and more common in ThinkPad model, we also see an increasing need to be able to update the firmware on these storage devices. This blog post will describe how to deploy the Solid State Drive Firmware Update Utility for ThinkPad through MDT. Overview of the solution:   Obtain and extract SSD firmware media Setup the server side folder structure Configure MDT Add SSD Firmware as MDT application Edit the Task Sequence Copy Command Install SSD Fir mware based on WMI Queries Obtain and extract SSD firmware media Begin by downloading the SSD Firmware update from the Lenovo Support Site. This is the current version as of July 25, 2016.  This package provides the firmware updates for several different SSD drives for several different ThinkPad models which are listed on the linked page.  The readme available from that page also identifies the specific SSD drives that are covered.  Once the .zip file is downloaded, extract it to FWSDXX folder whe

USB Balloon Tip after deploying SkyLake systems with ThinInstaller

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by rechols As part of our daily routine on the Lenovo Commercial Deployment Readiness Team we monitor the Enterprise Client Management Forum  for questions and issues raised by our enterprise customers. In researching and offering solutions to the issues posted there, we sometimes need to turn a solution that happened over the course of many back and forth posts into something more comprehensive. Recently one of our customers posted an issue with our ThinkPad systems that have the optional Huawei WWAN cards in them. The issue only shows up if you are utilizing ThinInstaller to deploy the drivers for your systems or you are deploying the Intel USB Extensible Host Adapter driver as an application in your task sequence. The result of deploying with one of the above methods is a balloon tip warning that "This device can perform faster" as in the screen shot below. Of course I didn't know immediately that this was something that; Only happens on machi