Hard Drive not recognized when booting from XP CD on docking station

[edgardo]

The hard drive on my X60 failed to the point where I couldn't recover and reinstall the image. I have backups of all my data and a docking station so I didn't sweat it. Bought a new drive and installed it and this is when the trouble began.

I created an XP CD with SP2 slipstreamed in to make sure I have the latest drivers. I boot from XP CD and everything works until I try to install Windows. According to the installation CD there is no drive installed!

I reinstalled the drive to make sure and this time I booted off of Ubuntu Linux which installed flawlessly. That leads me to believe that  there is a driver problem with Windows.

I need help! I would like to install Windows on the machine but nothing I've tried works.

[billbolton Community Moderator]

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edgardo wrote:
According to the installation CD there is no drive installed!

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Standard Microsoft XP SP2 does not come with any SATA device drivers. 

You have two options:

1. Go into the T60 BIOS and switch the SATA controller mode away from AHCI to "IDE" mode (or pehaps its "legacy" or "compatibility" mode - I forget what specific term is used in a ThinkPad BIOS).
   
2. Find the SATA device driver for XP (it's probably in the Intel Chipset driver download) on the Lenovo X60 support web site, download it and install it using the additional driver installation option which is offered right at the start of an XP install.

If you chose option 1, remember to switch the SATA controller back to AHCI mode in the BIOS after you have installed the SATA device driver.

Cheers,

Bill

Message Edited by billbolton on 03-09-2008 02:11 PM

[edgardo]

Thank you. That did the trick.

[jandone]

Hi,

thanks for good explanation. I bought a new hard drive Hitachi HTS723232L9A360 into my Lenovo X61s. As I want to downgrade to XP and the drive is SATA I'll need the workaround you described or is there possiblility that I won't need it?

Just to ask - is this the right driver you were talking about?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-67818

Thanks for advice

[luizsu6y7]

I had a similar problem around a month ago. What i did was i used a VM ware and installed using that. It worked fine. Another option is to make use of a virtual driver software like daemon tools.