Hard Drive Replacement on R61E - need help!

[donjerue]

My daughter's R61E's original 80GB Hitachi HDD drive recently self destructed, it was totally dead, confirmed by the Lenovo PC Doctor for DOS I downloaded off their website while trying to troubleshoot the problem. As a result;t there is no drive to Clone, and the problem, I am facing is that I also do not have the recover discs for this PC. I bought a new 250GB Hitachi HDD drive in the same formatted swapped it out, with the intent of loading up XP from the OEM disc I hold a license for. The problem, however, is that this XP Disc can't "see" the new drive, I get an error message that it's no drive is installed. Up updated the BIOS to the most current version, I also tried running the "Lenovo 2.5 SATA Hard Drive Firmware Update Utility (ver 1.0) that I got off of their site, figuring that maybe the increased capacity need a firmware update to be compatible. Well, this program, which runs at boot up, does show the new drive as being present, but does not allow the firmware update - it gave a message stating that the "drive must have an associated Lenovo part number installed " in order for this program to work...back to square 1....

So how do I get the drive to install so I can reload XP and rebuild my system....?

[dunedigger]

Sorry I can't help much YET ! I am in exactly the same position at the moment. It is as though Windows can't see the sata disk if it is unformatted, and I don't have another computer to format the 2.5 disk !

See the reply I received in post http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/R-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/R61-Hard-drive-info-wanted-SATA-Model/td-p/164...

Andys Reply is here

"Not being able to install a clean XP is because XP doesn't have the SATA driver you need. You can either slip stream it into an installation cd which you create yourself or, take the easy route and change the BIOS settings in Config > SATA to Compatibility Mode from AHCI."

Dunedigger

[donjerue]

I actually was just reading that reply to your post and am trying it now...seems to be working as it is letting me format the new HDD,,,stand by and I will post how I make out....

[donjerue]

It worked! The only question now is "Can I change the BIOS Setting Back to the original" or Should I?

[andyP Community SuperMod · Accepted solution]

You can change the setting back to SATA, but only after installing the Intel Matrix Storage Driver. Make sure you read and follow the installation instructions on the site, you'll need to scroll down quite a way.

The relevant part starts; "Note: If you do not have a diskette drive, you can install Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver by the following alternative procedure:"

[donjerue]

That worked like a charm, thanks! Now on to the mystery "SM Bus Controller" listed under Device manager/other devices and get that working, and the wireless card too (see my other post_

Don