T60 will not boot to windows and windows will not see the HD for some reason.

[wardonkey]

Good Morning,

I have a thinkpad t60 that for some reason will not boot into windows xp anymore.

I tossed in the windows XP disc to see if I could run a repair and for some reason it dose not see the HD.

I found some sata drivers for the unit and wondered if this is what I need how ever I do not have a floppy drive 

do I really need to buy a floppy to load these drivers? Are the drivers even needed? 

Im at a loss this thing is 2 yrs old and is hardly used and at this point I can not get windows to see a HD on this machine. 

i ran the diagnostic on it in the bios and it comes back 100% but im not sure how accurate that is. 

floppys are realativly cheap but its still weird that I would have to buyone to load sata drivers that should already be there. 

Any sugestions are help full thanks.

D.

[ajkula66 Guru]

Welcome to the forum!

Let's try this: enter BIOS, choose "startup" and from there "boot", change the mode to "diagnostics", press F10 to save and exit. The machine will now boot checking every component of the system. Are you able to "see" your hard drive, it should be recognized as "XYZ fixed disk"?

Good luck and let us know.

[wardonkey]

ok yeah i tried that is there a way to pause it it checks stuff and flashes by so fast I barley get a chance to see whats installed lol

pausebrake maybe?

[wardonkey]

ok i got it into diagnostic mode and somehow managed to get PC Dr working, it shows the drie 80gig sata I ran all the tests and they all passed read, write and so on.  So I did see a full erase option on there not sure if I want to do that yet if it is possible to get this working with out having to go tomy backup.

[ajkula66 Guru]

Erase of any kind is your very last option...

If both BIOS and PC-Doctor see the drive, I'd go back to attemting to boot in the safe mode...

BTW, is your HDD set to "compatible" in BIOS? That could be one of the possible problems...

Good luck and let us know.

[wardonkey]

ok that worked I set it to compatibility mode and it now sees the HD but when I boot to it it keeps booting into the think vantage rescue thing instead of booting to windows. I have the HD set as the first boot device is there a way to get it to just boot to the Disc and not think vantage so I can see if it will boot to the drive, before I was getting a windows error when I booted to the drive just want to see if I can get to that point again.