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Lenovo S400 IdeaPad – Upgrading RAM & Wireless Card + Installing Ubuntu
Comments: (2) - Author: Rishi
I bought a Lenovo S400 IdeaPad back in December last year, and well, it wasn’t such a great decision. To begin with, the pros of this laptop distract you so much that it is hard to get away from the idea of owning it. It’s very:
• lightweight and sleek
That’s about the entire list of its pros. Can’t think of anything better.
So I decided to get rid of the cons. Here they are:
• 4GB RAM – not enough sometimes
• wireless card – very slow
• no linux
Things that I haven’t been able to fix, but are annoyances nevertheless, are:
• glossy screen – somehow I like a matte screen much better
• weird touchpad – almost all these “Pads” in the market have this “no button” touchpad now which is hard to get used to
Requirements and Purchases
Things that you will need to upgrade your RAM and Wireless Card:
• RAM – I bought a Crucial Single 8GB DDR3 1600 MTS from Amazon – hereWireless Card – I bought an Intel Ultimate N / 450 Mbps from Amazon – here
• A mini screw driver set
• A BIOS that has been whitelisted to support any other wireless cards on IdeaPad S400.
Now the last thing on that list was the most time consuming of all. In a nutshell, Lenovo has locked down supported wireless cards to only the ones that they would like. So, you have to take a backup of your BIOS, give it to an expert and then download it back with a flash utility and flash your BIOS to whitelist every card. If you don’t do this, after you have changed your Wireless card, you will get a “Unauthorized wireless card; power off and remove it” message from your BIOS.
You may ask, why do you have to backup “your” BIOS and get it altered, isn’t there already a copy on the Internet that you could “just” use. Yes, there are copies but they have customizations that will not go well with your laptop. Hence, you want to keep things simple – flashing a BIOS with someone else’s copy is not to be taken lightly (it may brick your laptop).
 So that I don’t have to keep replacing my Wireless card until I got my BIOS flashed, I also bought a:
• USB Network Wireless Device from Amazon
..that I used until the wireless card started working. All this time I had to keep my Wireless card disabled in BIOS, so that I don’t get the “Unauthorized..” message.
 
Getting BIOS modified to whitelist Network cards
Now, to get into the BIOS, you have to use the “Fn+F2″ key (or just F2 if hotkeys are disabled) on the “Lenovo” screen.
If you are only looking to add RAM to your laptop, you can skip this section.
To get a copy of your BIOS which has wireless cards whitelisted, you will have to use Windows and follow these steps (CAUTION: use the following at your “own” risk, I take no responsibility if you brick your laptop):
1. go into your BIOS (Fn+F2 key or just F2 key if your hotkey (Fn) is disabled) and note your BIOS version and other details and post it on the forum (in the next step) along with the backup of your BIOS (see third step)
2. post it on this forum http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/5866-LENOVO-(IBM)-Bioses-especially-Thinkpad
3. post your current BIOS on the forum above by first backing it up using this utility: http://fryol.net/b/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/backup_bios.zip
1. to use this utility, copy the files into C:\ so that C: has _BACK directory in it and then open a command prompt “Run as Administrator”
2. go to C: (just type C: and press enter) and then cd C:\_BACK
3. run backup.bat (just type backup.bat and press enter)
4. you will get a .bin file in that directory, zip it up and upload it using http://sendspace.com and give the folks in forum a link to it along with other details from your BIOS – also, make sure that you tell them that you need wireless whitelisting plus give them a hint to use the “prr” tool for this
4. if the forum guys tell you to flash from a pure DOS environment, try the following steps, if not, then you just run that utility from Windows and things should go well. For me, Lenovo had locked the BIOS by disabling flashing and I had to flash it from pure DOS environment.
5. once you get a link back with the whitelisted BIOS, create a DOS bootable USB drive using this link
6. you have to now flash your BIOS from a “pure DOS” environment, hence you have to create this disk, copy stuff from the archive you got from the forum, reboot into DOS and then run “flash.bat”
7. just copy the files from the archive you got the link back as (don’t copy extra drivers utilities as some sites suggests – you will need as much memory as possible and copying CD drivers etc. blocks up all that space and you will get failures)
8. to boot from the USB disk, make sure you have enabled “legacy” boot in BIOS and have selected USB as the first boot device. If you don’t see boot device order, restart your computer again to see it (InsydeH2O supposedly has a bug)
9. once you boot up into DOS, all you have to do is run flash.bat (or whatever the forum post instructed you to run) and you should see a rewriting of BIOS

Above was all of the software part to get your Wireless card done. What follows is how to disassemble the laptop and get the Wireless card and RAM installed physically.

Physical Changes (Installing the Wireless Card/RAM)

To upgrade the RAM and Wireless card, you have to open up the laptop. It’s pretty simple though, and here are some photographs of how I did it.

• Get rid of the battery first:
• 
• Start by unscrewing the left-most screw below where the battery was:
• 
• The second screw in the middle:
• 
• And then the right-most one:
• 
• The uncover more screws beneath those soft pads (notice the direction in which they open) – you would need a tiny flat screwdriver to pop them open:
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• The one on the right to battery opens towards right:
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• The one on the left of the battery, open towards the left:
• 
• The front ones both open towards the back (or towards the battery):
• 
• Make sure ethernet cable is detached (if you have one connected) and then slowly work your way to open this thing up. Don’t exert too much force, but keep applying tact to open it.
• Now in this photo here, you can see that the RAM is on the lower right hand side. The RAM comes off very easily if you use a flat screwdriver to unlock the holding gate (a shiny one). I forgot to take more photos of that, but you can very easily find something elsewhere on the internets (you don’t have to though, it’s easy to figure).
• 
• Now the wireless card is beneath a black bus wire that needs to be disconnected by opening up another locking gate (black and plastic in nature) towards you.  Please be very careful.
• 
• Again, use a flat small screwdriver for this and very gently latch open this thing. Notice how the gate is now facing upwards (v/s it was latched down in the previous photo). It’s hinged to the white bank.
• 
• Once the gate is open, you can hold the bus and drag it out. Gently, very gently. See the next photo.
• 
• As I hold up the bus wire, you can see the wireless card that is connected by two cables – one black and one white (these are supposedly the “antennae” wire) and it’s again “banked” into a black socket.
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• Unscrew the only screw that’s holding this thing in place:
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• After you’ve unscrewed it, it’s very easy to slide this thing out from the black bank (it kind of pops up a little bit already), gently pull it out:
• 
• Notice how I disconnect the wires, you don’t need any tools to do so, just gently twist and pull them out. They will come off with just the right amount of pull. The following photo shows the “black” one out already (also notice that the black one goes on the left, the white one on right – although it shouldn’t matter a lot).
• 
• Now, I keep the old one down and take the new one up (notice that my new card has “three” sockets v/s only “two” on the old one). The new one has an extra socket but you can use the ones on the sides only and you’re good.
• 
• The black one is now being connected to the left most socket, the white one on to the right most socket.
• 
• There, it’s all connected (gentle pressure puts them in).
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• Slide the card back into the bank.
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• Push the bus wire back in from the top and latch the black gate in.
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• Covering the laptop up is just as easy you pulled it apart, just drive the screws back in after you’ve latched the cover on.

Installing Ubuntu

My objective of having Ubuntu installed was to make sure that I can dual boot into Windows and Ubutu from the GRUB menu with UEFI enabled. A rough outline to keep things in mind follows

• Download 64bit Ubuntu from ubuntu.com when you want to burn the image to CD
• Make sure you disable “Secure Boot” in BIOS under the Boot Options menu (use F2 or Fn+F2 key to get into BIOS)
• To boot from the CD you will have to enable “Legacy Mode” instead of UEFI Mode – also, reboot and go into BIOS again to select Notebook Bay etc. in boot priority above the hard drive
• Once you get into Ubuntu installation, make sure that you give Ubuntu it’s own /boot and select “Grub” as boot method
• Ubuntu will load up GRUB but you will not be able to load up Windows since UEFI has been disabled in BIOS, hence go back into BIOS and enable UEFI boot mode
• Now get into Windows (and you wouldn’t see Ubuntu boot options by the way) and install something called “EasyBCD” which lets you install an EFI image for Ubuntu (it can auto-detect and do so) – there is documentation online if you search about how to use EasyBCD to enable Ubuntu dual booting with Windows
• You will have to go back into Ubuntu and modify /boot/grub/menu.lst to fix the Windows UEFI boot image there in case it’s not working