rezaghp:
Vista (and the IBM Preload) have a nice way of screwing with your boot tables; when I repartitioned my drive to wipe Vista (ick!) and install XP, I ran into a load of problems!
First of all, in order to load from a boot disc, you'll have to get into the bios (F1 during pre-boot, I believe), then set your SATA option from "AHCI" to "Compatibility" mode, and move the CD-DVD drive to the top of the boot order. If you're fuzzy on how to do this, search around on the forums for "compatibility mode" and you'll likely find a walkthrough. You need to do this in order to allow the CD/DVD drive to come first in the true boot order; if you just change the boot order and don't change the HDD mode, the HDD will pre-empt the boot process and load windows anyway.
Now that you can boot from CD, get yourself a Windows Vista or Windows XP DVD (not a CD, since the drive is natively DVD). Pop that in before boot, and it will give you the option to "repair" Windows. This SHOULD restore the boot tables to your proper drives. The reasoning here is that the service partition was likely on "C", and Lenovo puts Windows on the "D" drive... well, Windows doesn't LIKE to boot from the "D" drive when there are no boot tables to reference "C", (apparently, Lenovo's preload has the boot tables stored on C... ?!?!) so it pukes out.
Now, after all of that, I personally recommend backing up all your pertinent data and just downgrading to XP-Pro SP3. It's safer, cleaner, faster, and there's a larger knowledgebase for fixes. To do this, you can simply boot from the XP DVD, delete all three partitions, and format the entire disk into one volume (C) to load XP. It took me three repartitions and two deep formats to figure all of this out, but in the end, was very much worth it.
Finally, if all else fails, you could just send away for recovery disks -- you may need to fork over some money for 'em, though.
- MeMo
