I really wanted to dive into the world of Open Source operating systems, so I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu (13.10), and installed it on a clean(no operating system installed, absolutely nothing) Lenovo ThinkPad machine.

After a few days, I wanted to try out a different Operating System (Elementary OS). I downloaded the ISO file, burned it to a USB, tested that the USB booted from a different computer (I have 2, one is the Lenovo, the other a HP). I was able to get the bootscreen, and everything worked like a charm after I set the BIOS to boot from USB Disk Drive instead of HD.

After this, I went back to Lenovo, and tried to open up the boot menu, by pressing F12, so that I could load from a temporary device.

To my surprise, nothing but the HD was listed. There was no Optical Drive, No USB Drive, absolutely nothing.

So, I thought that these devices were probably disabled. So I went into my BIOS and checked to see what was the case. I saw that all my devices were enabled. USB and all the other devices such as network cable and the rest were all enabled.

So, I thought this probably had something to do wit UEFI and Legacy Boot options. So, I made sure that both were enabled.

This did not solve the problem either. Again, I got nothing but the option to boot from my Hard Disk.

I thought the USB had to be at fault. I tried different ports, but to no avail. Next, I tried with a Live CD, which had Ubuntu on it. This failed too. I simply could not boot from anything other than my hard disk.

Okay, so at this point, I was pretty desperate, so I installed Boot-Repair through:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boot-repair

What this did is lead me to GRUB. Ideally, its just a screen that gives me the option to load from Ubuntu or Advanced Settings. The Advanced settings had nothing but Ubuntu options in it.

So, I kept on pressing ESC and that led me to the the grub console, and thats where I am right now with my Lenovo.

I've also tried updating the BIOS, but Lenovo only has packages for Red Hat and Windows. So, a dead end there too.

Right now, I need to know if there is any way that I can just delete everything from my Lenovo? I want to revert it back to its blank factory condition. How can I achieve this?

I have tried to elaborate my problem as best I could. If there is any important information that I've missed out, please do not hesitate to leave a comment. I would have included some screen shots, but BIOS screen shots are a little hard to manage. However, I can provide a camera Image of the boot screen if needed (doing that as we speak).