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It's most likely an off-lease corporate PC that didn't get properly wiped.
Like the other poster said, if you boot from a USB drive you should be able to wipe out windows easily enough.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Linux
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If that does not work, remove the boot medium and connect it to another Linux machine to wipe it.
And you may have to reset the bios.
Good advice, although you'd be surprised how often corporate machines don't have any BIOS/UEFI security.
Thank you for the confirmation! I’m excited to post the “I did it!” at some point this week.
Good luck! If you have trouble getting it to boot from usb, try not to get too discouraged. It sometimes takes a couple tries with some of these little PCs.
Also, 2 things:
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don't trash the old USB drive yet. Try using gparted or some other utility to departition and repartition it. Sometimes, those things can get corrupted but not actually ruined.
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you probably already figured this out, but don't use the same USB port for the next try. If the drive WAS killed, it's possible that the port is physically damaged.
I appreciate that. This is definitely going to be a long learning process for me, but the boundless optimism here, and my malignant hatred for windows, will hopefully keep me going
Not if it is Intune enrolled
Amazon OS? Is there such a thing?
Anyway, have you tried booting from a live USB to install Linux? DuckDuckGo says this about the Lenovo mini PC: To enter the BIOS on a Lenovo mini PC, you typically need to press the F1 or F2 key during the startup process. If these keys do not work, you can also try the Enter key or consult the user manual for your specific model.
Amazon OS? Is there such a thing?
Amazon Linux is definitely a thing, but not for desktop OS (I mean it's Linux, so I don't see why not, but ...)
And yeah, any number of keys are used to enter the bios or boot menu! Del, left shift, f12, f10, f2, etc.
Just keep trying them!
Oh, and sometimes tab will disable the little splash menu so you can see the boot prompts.
Replying to track what I’ve tried so far. It’s a loooong boot
F1, f12, left shift
You need wait only until the os starts loading. This should be well below 30sec.
And absolutely crush all of them while you're booting. You're not gonna hurt anything.
I wish it were so short. It’s about a minute per boot, and I have never mashed this hard or long in my life. Still worth
It’s a thing as far as I can tell. Or it’s a strong overlay on top of windows. I currently can’t tell, given that I’m fighting with a second login screen on top of the usual pc setup.
I haven’t tried that yet, that was going to be the first thing i wanted to try tomorrow. The front port ate my last good usb, so I intended to buy another tomorrow. I appreciate you affirming that that was the correct route, as I’m fairly new to all of this
Delete is usually the key to press on Lenovo machines to get to the BIOS so you can change the boot load order and redo or disable secure boot.
I'm curious about what is on that ssd. If you are too and the ssd is removable, taking it out and putting it in an enclosure to see what's on it would be interesting.
I can try it. If it happens to be interesting, which I personally doubt, would there be any interest in my dumping it onto mediafire or some such? I can parse the difference between windows, MacOS, Linux, but delving into something even slightly more opaque is beyond me.
It's up to you. The reason I'm into computers was because I broke the family computer when I was a kid and had to fix it so my parents wouldn't find out that I broke it, lol. From there my curiosity about how they worked and how to upgrade them only took me further. Now I have 8 machines and 1 lenovo mini as a router in my house and none run Windows anymore. Anything from Mint, Fedora, OpenSUSE, OPNSense, Debian, Raspbian, SteamOS, and Arch (btw). My next project will be checking out how Plasma Big Screen is coming along and build a home theater PC. Your new hobby can take you down some rabbit holes for sure. An unwiped corporate SSD is quite a big slip up for their infosec team if it wasn't stolen.
That’s a significantly more interesting story than my start (and long stall). “What’s a tracking cookie?” I asked webcrawler. And then my personality became open source freeware for 6 years.
But if you think that there might be anything of interest, I’ll definitely check it out. Others mentioned that it’s likely a distro of red hat so I’ll see if I can somehow dump or sync it to a flash drive. Unfortunately, I don’t have any spare ssds to swap, and while I’d love to sync the OS to a drive, my priority is definitely to get the flip off of windows already.
I thought it's a RHEL distro.
You might be right, but in my defense, I am very dumb.
Nah, ignorance is always fixable. Everyone has to learn at some point. Willful ignorance though is stupid. Have fun learning.
If it was stolen it needs to be returned
