[jlgaddis]

First, let me say that if you're doing a clean/new installation, I'd recommend installing CentOS 7.5 directly (as opposed to, say, installing 7.0 and immediately upgrading to 7.5). 7.0 is almost four years old at this point and your ThinkPad's hardware may be slightly better supported by 7.5.

Anyways, you might consider posting the details (including verbatim error messages, hardware (partitioning) details, etc.) in a new post on the CentOS forums [0] or inquire about the error message on the CentOS IRC channel [1].

Alternatively, if you continue to run into issues with the installation, feel free to reach out to me if you'd like. I'm not associated with either Red Hat or CentOS but I do run a lot of RHEL/CentOS machines (mostly on servers but I do happen to have a ThinkPad running RHEL 7.5 sitting here by me) and I'd be happy to help troubleshoot the issue with you, if necessary.

[0]: https://www.centos.org/forums/

[1]: https://wiki.centos.org/irc

[Teknoman117]

I was trying to bring up a server with CentOS 7.4 a few months ago. Problem is the stupid thing can't persist EFI variables so it can't remember the installer adding an entry for EFI/centos/icantrememberloadername.efi

It seemed that the EFI/boot/bootx64.efi that would get loaded instead (EFI default loader search) couldn't find grub in the EFI/centos folder. It booted fine after I copied the relavent grub files over to EFI/boot, but it seemed like a really kludgy solution. Fine for a single research box, but not for production.

[eatandwonder]

That's very kind, thank you. I'll try your suggestions and will keep your generous offer in mind.