Installing Windows 10 on Lenovo Ideapad L3-15ITL6

The story of how I first encountered the lack of drivers when installing Windows …

From time to time in my environment there are people who want to install / reinstall the operating system on their laptop. I suggest to everyone, but so far no one has agreed to install GNU/Linux. That is what happened this time as well.

And now I have a laptop. Lenovo Ideapad L3-15ITL6. Who would have thought that he would become my teacher.

It all started as usual: I downloaded the official Windows 10 image, made a bootable USB flash drive using Ventoy (I used to roll the image onto a USB flash drive using ddbut some need one thing, others need another, so I switched to a multiboot system), put the image on a USB flash drive, run it and … I am greeted by a window:

I have never seen this window empty in any installation before. But I thought, I know what to do: find and download the driver put it on a USB flash drive download the driver during installation.

The search query “lenovo ideapad 3 15itl6 storage driver” gave an unambiguous result – Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) Driver. I downloaded the proposed exe-shnik and threw it on a bootable USB flash drive.

I repeat the OS installation procedure and, having met the already familiar empty window, I quickly click to download the driver and go to the USB flash drive, where the first disappointment awaited – the system does not see any driver there.

This picture led me to the idea “Probably, the driver installer should be in the installation image.” No problem: mount the image drop the driver installer unmount.

There are problems.

As a working system I use Ubuntu 20.04. Install with the command:

sudo mount -o loop,rw Win10_22H2_Russian_x64.iso Win10/

And I get a warning WARNING: device write-protected, mounted read-only. So you can’t just take and throw the file into the image.

I found out that the image has a file system according to the ISO 9660 standard, which does not provide mechanisms for changing data. Therefore, the algorithm for working with the image has changed: mount the image copy the contents to a new directory add the driver installer build the image.

A program was found to build the image genisoimageand ChatGPT suggested how to use it to build the installation image:

sudo genisoimage -o Win10_22H2_Russian_x64_15ITL6.iso \
-b boot/etfsboot.com -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table\
-eltorito-alt-boot -e efi/microsoft/boot/efisys.bin -no-emul-boot \
-J -R -V "Win10_22H2_Russian_x64_15ITL6" \
-allow-limited-size Win10

The image is ready.

I’m reinstalling the OS. Everything is the same, at the installation stage the provided exe file is not visible.

I began to suspect that the matter was not in the location of the file – a different driver format was needed. Colleagues suggested trying to unpack the exe file. I try and get the following:

7z x IRST_Driver_15ITL6.exe

tree -a
.
├── [0]
├── .bss
├── CERTIFICATE
├── .data
├── .idata
├── .itext
├── .rdata
├── .rsrc
│   ├── 0
│   │   ├── RCDATA
│   │   │   ├── 11111
│   │   │   ├── DVCLAL
│   │   │   └── PACKAGEINFO
│   │   └── string.txt
│   ├── 1033
│   │   ├── GROUP_ICON
│   │   │   └── MAINICON
│   │   ├── MANIFEST
│   │   │   └── 1
│   │   ├── RCDATA
│   │   │   └── CHARTABLE
│   │   └── version.txt
│   └── 1043
│       └── ICON
│           ├── 1.ico
│           ├── 2.ico
│           ├── 3.ico
│           └── 4.ico
├── .text
└── .tls

An inner voice tells you that there is not what is needed here.

Since unpacking in this form did not give results, it was decided to try installing the driver on a virtual machine in order to extract the files.

It turned out that when you run the driver installer, it is possible to unpack without installing. Unpacked:

cd Intel IRST Driver
tree -a
.
└── 20231002.16463638
    ├── Setup.cmd
    └── Source
        ├── iaStorAfsNative.exe
        ├── iaStorAfsService.exe
        ├── iaStorAfs.sys
        ├── iaStorVD.cat
        ├── iaStorVD.inf
        ├── iaStorVD.sys
        ├── Optane.dll
        ├── OptaneEventLogMsg.dll
        ├── RstMwEventLogMsg.dll
        └── RstMwService.exe

Threw a folder with files on a bootable USB flash drive. I reach the breakpoint, select the folder with the driver … done, the driver is found and installed.

The long-awaited disk is found, the OS is installed, everyone is happy.