Solved PC Name Stuck at Invalid – How to Fix?

In IBM tech just installed a new motherboard to my Lenovo Legion laptop. This was to deal with a USB-A ports problem. The repair seems to have worked fine. However, when I did a quick check to see if Windows was still activated properly (it was) I see in Settings > Home that the my PC name is considered 'Invalid'. The name I had, and which I want to keep using is LEGION



I tried (temporarily) renaming to LEGION2 but on reboot this too was said to be Invalid. So I renamed back to LEGION. Which, once again, after reboot was said to be Invalid.

Cutting a long story short, and following advice on the internet, I did the following:

1) Ran [CODE]dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth[/CODE] This completed successfully.
2) I then did an SFC /SCANNOW This also completed with no problems.

Then using Powershell as administrator I changed the name a couple of times between LEGION and LEGION2 — all without success, the name is still reported as Invalid. So now I've changed the name back to LEGION, still marked as Invalid, and now I'm stuck.

Does anyone know how I can cure this problem?

P.S. I should say that as far as I can see the system seems to be running fine. I would also note that I am an administrator on this machine and seems to be running fine from that point of view too.

Hello,

The "INVALID" name shown in your screenshot would be for the system product name instead of computer name. This is often specified by the OEM.

You should be able to change this using the method in the tutorial below.

Thank you Brink! I don't have what is displayed in your tutorial on my PC. System > About just shows LEGION INVALID -- it does not say anything about "System Product Name".

If I restore the laptop from an image file made before the tech changed the motherboard would that solve the issue? (This problem would not be in the image file I made.)

I did look in the registry as per the tutorial but there is nothing there.

This is normal.

If you don't have a Model string value, you'll have to manually add it per the note box under step 3.

I just phoned Lenovo Tech Services on this and they said they will have to get the tech out again to fix the problem. Hence, forget about this for now. I'll just wait see how it goes with the tech. Thanks you very much for your responses.

Ok. Please let us know how it went, and if you need more help with this.

Hello Brink,

Did the following:

• Restored system from earlier system image file (thinking, as the tech said, that it might be a Windows problem) — that didn't work.
• From an image file restored the system back to as it was at the time the tech left my house.
• Tried the registry 'fix' (as above) that kind of half-worked in that Windows no longer reported the name as being 'INVALID'. However, my Lenovo Vantage app still marked the Product Number (MTM — Machine Type Model) as still being 'INVALID'. So the registry was a kind of 'fix' for Windows but not the Lenovo Vantage app. On further experiment with the registry found that I think the 'fix' in the registry is arbitrary in as much as you could enter any string you like and it would be accepted. On that basis I just deleted the 'Model' value again as it wasn't really curing the issue.
• Contacted Lenovo and they asked via a couple of emails for screenshots and photos showing the problem. Then have to wait over the weekend for them to get back in touch me over this.

• Being the curious type, on research I found out what needed to try and fix was an application known as 'Lenovo Golden Key U1'. By a very round-about means managed to get copy of that and by a variety of means eventually managed to get a bootable flash drive with 'U1' on it.
• Used that flash drive which got me access to the area of the BIOS that I needed to get to and entered what I thought was the correct string for the MTM — I got the string from the label on the base of the laptop. Result of that was that Lenovo Vantage app no longer showed the Product Number (MTM) as 'INVALID' the string was accepted as okay. And there are no 'complaints' from Windows, though Windows only shows the first four characters of the string — and I don't know if that is correct. In any case the machine seems to be working just fine.

So, in all, the technician that replaced the motherboard had entered an invalid string for the MTM data value. He had mistaken an alphabetic uppercase 'O' character for a numeric '0' zero character, so he entered the zero, and had omitted two characters 'WW' at the end of the string.

After doing all that I checked via Lenovo Vantage for any updates. Turned out that there was a BIOS update. Did that update and it went fine. So there are no problems with the BIOS and it all seems cured now. My takeaway from this is don't automatically trust that service technicians are getting things right with their work. And the tech's pronouncement as he left my home that it was a Windows problem was just plain hokum which I would paraphrase as — "Not my fault! Windows! Do a complete reinstall of Windows!" as he scurried away.

So now I've emailed Lenovo saying that I managed to fix it. Though I suppose they'll be unhappy that I got a 'U1' key, so wait see what they say to that.

Glad you got it sorted.

It's always bad when they just blame the OS instead when they don't know or caused the issue.

When repair boards are shipped out, they don't have any S/N burned into BIOS. The factory or field tech is supposed to follow the process to copy back the original S/N. The reason they hate having you have a copy of their software, it allows unscrupulous people to duplicate HW S/N's and avoid paying for extra software licenses.

Just to round this off, I got an email from Lenovo saying they are glad I managed to solve the problem myself. They didn't say anything at all about me having a U1 key. End of story I suppose.