Of course there are several tools required for this adventure: Note: If you’re not interested in the how & why and only want to see the end result, skip to the “TL DR:” section at the end of this post. Instead, I’m going to get out the tools and modify the firmware myself. I’m not a huge friend of magic binaries sent to me by strangers, especially if they’re that critical, plus I’d like to know what’s going on inside of it, so that’s no option for me. Now, there are places on the internet where you just upload your firmware image, and someone will send you an appropriately modified image back. The solution to this is obvious: We need to modify the firmware (or the “LenovoWmaPolicyDxe” module, to be specific) to stop refusing hardware that’s not on the whitelist. They’ve been pissing off their customers with this bullshit for years. Now, Lenovo is not the only company to do that, but it’s one of the more prominent examples. Unfortunately for us, Lenovo chose to include a special module called “LenovoWmaPolicyDxe” in their firmware, whose sole responsibility is to check hardware found in the M.2 slot against a list of allowed hardware (called a whitelist), and, if it’s not on the list, prevent the system from booting. This firmware is stored on an SPI flash chip located near the RAM-slots, and it’s responsibility is not only to initialize the hardware, but also to provide configuration options to the user and an interface to the operating system. This software used to be called “BIOS”, but nowadays, “UEFI firmware” more accurately describes it. When your T440p turns on, there’s a special kind of software that gets run. Yes, this is one of those machines, those that try to tell you what you are allowed to install in it and what not. I recently picked up a Lenovo ThinkPad T440p, a pretty good machine - sturdy, decent battery life, and upgradeable to be a pretty powerful machine.

Lenovo thinkpad t440p m2 slot