I tried again with the official ISO directly `dd`ed to the USB drive. This time it has no problem to boot into installer. Sorry for the false alarm. Either I had made a mistake or the ISO I downloaded had certain glitch with it. The former ISO is the one I downloaded from "15.0-Current" while the second one downloaded from "15.0". Their "last modified time"s are different but I assume they are almost the same, right? Anyway, there is no problem for T420s. I am truly sorry for the extra work I caused, especially for Steffen.