I found an old laptop, model Lenovo E430C, and plan to use it as a server.
I wanted to find a way to leave the laptop unattended, making it possible to start the laptop automatically or manually after shutdown.
I first tried enabling WOL as this is available in the normal bios, but unfortunately when I shut down the laptop And send the magic packet to the machine , but the laptop does not turn on.
One difference I observed from the shutdown of my other WOL-enabled laptop was that the network port light did not come on (with the network cable already plugged in).
I suspected that the problem was a poor contact on the network port (you need to push the cable hard to the top of the port in boot mode to network), so I bought a USB network card and turned on the option in the bios to supply power to the usb in the shutdown state and turned on the WOL option when installing the drivers, but it still didn’t help.
I suspected that the bios would not power the card by default. So I did some web searching and found that power is only supplied to the card in the S5 shutdown state, and I suspect that the laptop’s default shutdown state is S6.
So I ran shutdown -h now under linux (which should enter the S5 state instead of S6) and found that the default NIC for its laptop was able to wake up the machine with a magic packet, while the external USB NIC was not.
I tried looking for ways to get into the advanced bios, tried looking for options about whether or not to power up the NIC when the laptop is turned off, and found that many of the methods require keystrokes on the laptop’s built-in keyboard to get in, but alas, my laptop’s built-in keyboard is broken.
I tried to use UEFITools to look for advanced options in the bios firmware, and found a “LenovoPlatformHiiAdvancedDxe”, which I tried to save locally, and then use ifrextractor to convert it to human-readable text. I didn’t find any option about whether to power up the card or shutdown by default. However, I did find an option called “State After G3”, which after a bit of web searching seemed to enable the computer to boot up automatically when the power was turned back on after a power failure, so I used the grub-mod-setup_var utility to modify this option, setting it to enabled after powering off and then powering on again, but it didn’t work.
Can anyone help me with these issues, I would like to turn on the advanced options and set the machine to power off to power on the network card so I can use the magic pack to wake up the computer, or if that doesn’t work, have the computer automatically turn on when laptop power failure and power back again. Also, do I need the bios to have a driver for the device to do WOL using a usb NIC, I found a driver for uefi on the NIC driver download page, I don’t know if this has anything to do with WOL.
If anyone can do any of this I would sincerely appreciate it!
Bios file: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1…sp=sharing