>>no idea, but why did you not try out a live-from-dvd-linux ? Might have given some hint, as the pre-boot missing LED are mystifying. If the Laptop is beefy enough, consider having a Linux host and W7 and W8 guest systems.
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>You are right - it did not occur to me at the time. I shall consider doing so this coming weekend. Perhaps a good reason to make the move to Linux. The laptop is "beefy" enough; 8Gb RAM, 2.5Ghz CPU, Lenovo Thinkpad T520 model.

in NT4/W2K/XP times I went overboard having about a dozen machines (2 or 3 flats with one or 2 desktops, some clients with a dedicated desktop machine and 2 laptops) with at least 5 multiboot options on each machine at that time (Dos/Win16, Linux-safety, NT-flavor, NT-flavor-backup. new NT...). Nowadays VM spare me from a lot of grunt work keeping it all running - on half as many physical machines. HInt: get an USB3 external disk if you need to take one VM with you in a hurry and want the machine to stay. Yes, machine is fast enough, I am running similar HW in laptop ;-)