Missing drivers

[RogerO]

My 3000 N200 (0769) laptop was recently infected w/ a rootkit virus that could not be removed.  I was hoping to salvage this laptop for personal use by wiping the drive and installing XP Professional once again.  Wiping the drive was easy enough but when installing XP the installation stalled and gave me a screen that stated something about the installation could not continue as there were drivers missing from the hard drive.  I searched the Lenovo download page and d/l'ed everything I could find for the 0769 series (using another computer of course).  I burned all of the exe files to one CDR, inserted it into the laptop, booted up and got nothing.  Was that because I burned all of the exe files to one CDR?  Would it work if I used a separate CDR for each exe file?  Is there some other way of getting the drivers back on the laptop?   I tried using a thumb drive without success as well.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[topmahof Community Moderator]

Hi RogerO and welcome to the community,

The driver that's missing is the AHCI driver for the SATA hard drive. Without it, XP won't load. XP doesn't have native SATA drivers. 

Go into the bios and change the SATA controller from AHCI to Compatible and XP will load.  You'll have to put the driver in later.  

You could try burning that one driver onto a cd.  Early in the XP install, it will ask for drivers.  See if it will take the driver and load it.  If not, you'll have to install it later.

Dave

[RogerO]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the advice.  I'll give that a try and report back.

Roger

[RogerO]

>Go into the bios and change the SATA controller from AHCI to Compatible

I couldn't find that verbiage in the BIOS.  However, I did find this: "SATA HDD AHCI Mode: Enabled".  I changed it to "Disabled" and XP completed the installation.  No audio or wireless devices are shown so I'll have to investigate that.  And I'll have to find the AHCI driver that's missing and install it.  But it looks like the computer is on its way to being a working computer once again.

Thanks again for the advice.

Roger

[topmahof Community Moderator]

Hi Roger,

It looks like you found the right place.

You can go here and get your driver list.  The AHCI driver will be listed under storage.

Dave

[RogerO]

Thanks again for your help, Dave!

Roger

[RogerO]

Update:

I installed the driver, reset the BIOS to read "Enabled" (for the SATA HDD AHCI mode) and rebooted.  Just after the black XP Professional screen, it flashed a blue screen (w/ white wording but flashed so fast I couldn't read any of it), and went to a screen that indicated there was a problem w/ Windows shutting down previously and recommended booting in safe mode.  I was supposed to enable the AHCI again, wasn't I?  In the disabled mode, XP opens fine and appears normal except that there's still no audio or wireless despite the fact that drivers are installed for them.  When checking for the device manager listing here is a yellow question mark on "other devices" (ethernet controller, base system driver, PCI device, SM bus, video controller, etc.) so there must be more that I need to install.

Open to suggestions... 

Thanks,

Roger

[topmahof Community Moderator]

Hi Roger,

Let's do the ACHI driver first.  It has to be installed manually.  Set the bios back so it boots.  Go into control panel, system, device manager and click on IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.  Right click on Primary IDE Channel and choose update driver.  On the window that comes up choose no, not at this time.  In the next window, choose, install from a list or specific location. In the next window, choose, don't search.  I will choose the driver to install.  In the next window, see if your SATA driver is in the list, then choose it.  Install it and reboot.  Go into the bios and change it to SATA.  Windows should find the driver.

If it doesn't, go back to the window where you choose to install from a list or specific location and check the box, Include this location in the search and go to the folder where the driver was downloaded to and see if you can update the driver from there.  Again, reboot and change the bios back to SATA.

See if any of that works.

Dave 

[RogerO]

I'll give that a try tonight, Dave. Thanks!

[topmahof Community Moderator]

Roger,

Yeh, it's a little trickier getting Windows to accept them later, but that should work. 

As far as your other devices, you might want to go into device manager and get the hardware id numbers so we know we're getting the drivers for the right hardware.  Unless, you're sure you know what hardware is actually in there.

Dave