Turning a cheap Lenovo M72e into a server
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Recently, I found a really nice tutorial on how to set up a private home server. The tutorial was very detailed. I have actually been curious about owning a private server, so I decided to set up my own.
I bought a small form factor PC from Mercari for 5,500 yen. It is a Lenovo M72e — pretty old. I was afraid that it wouldn’t be able to function as a private server. One of the requirements is having the virtualization function enabled, and after doing some Googling, there was no problem with this machine.
Installing the Ubuntu server succeeded. I couldn’t wait to log in and set everything up, but wait — it didn’t work. There was this Lenovo ERROR CODE 1962. It took me a day to fix it. There was no point modifying anything in the BIOS. I also cleared the CMOS, but nothing happened. Until I finally found the fix. The reason is that the machine’s motherboard or BIOS is set up to only boot from Windows. I found the fix on Reddit — basically, it allows you to deceive the system by rewriting the Windows Boot Manager file to allow Ubuntu to boot (EFI Boot Manager? I don’t know the technical details). All in all, the steps to fix it were straightforward, and after that, I got my machine running.