Installing Windows XP - ThinkPad X220 (w/SSD)

[austinx]

Good evening everyone,

I have been looking through the Lenovo forums for the past few months to try and figure out how to sucessfully install Windows XP Professional (x86) on my X220 with a solid state drive. From what I have read, that is the source of the problem as XP can not understand the complex archetecture of the solid state drive. The article that I have found (but have not had success with deploying the solution) is located here that was referenced from the original forum post I encountered.

I am really hoping to hear from others who have had success installing XP on their X220's or other computers that have a similar problem. Any resources or tactics to help me out would be much appreciated, I am very hopeful that I can get XP installed on my system!

[goretsky Community Moderator]

Hello,

Have you considered using XP Mode under Microsoft Windows 7 instead of running Microsoft Windows XP natively on the X220?

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

[austinx]

I have looked at XP Mode but it isn't the solution I am looking for. I am looking to install either XP Professional or XP Professional x64 (preferably) to take full advantage of my system.

[ajkula66 Guru]

You'll get next to no support when it comes to Lenovo's drivers for 64-bit version of XP.

My experience is that SSDs don't play well with XP, even after tweaking. YMMV.

[austinx]

I realize that I can "slipstream" if necessary but can not find the appropriate driver to recognize the SATA HD. Anyone have any idea what file I'm looking for?

[goretsky Community Moderator]

Hello,

My understanding is that all models of the ThinkPad X220 use the Intel Mobile QM67 Express Chipset.  If that is the case, the appropriate SATA disk drivers should be located here on Intel's web site.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

[ccl13]

Well I'll try to put it as simple as I can and cover most issues you should aware.

First of all, yes XP could be installed on SSD on X220, which is not the case actually.

Technically you have to prepare two things, one is you'd need a driver that supports AHCI, as provided by @goretsky: THIS. Be sure to read the instructions inside.

And another thing you will need is a tool to partition your SSD before you install XP. Such tools can be found by searching "preparing advanced format drive for windows xp", you may find something useful. Or the easy way is to insert the drive into another computer and partition it under Windows 7. Be sure to use MBR and make the first partition a primary partition as your boot volume. Don't forget to mark the boot partition active, and don't re-partition it while installing XP (You may want to format it though).

OK then there is the actually the troublesome part.

Since XP is not well supported by new hardware, you should be acknowledged that installing XP is not a good choice. XP will never take full advantage of the system since it has bad support of the new power saving technologies of the CPU and main board. There are less and less new drivers for WinXP now so your system may go out of driver fix.

Plus, Windows XP x64 is actually not a XP, so be careful if you want it to do something productive, it may fail you. And the worse thing is, you'll need a bunch of tools in case of bad luck, like when your system is down (pretty normal for XP), because if you try to fix it, AHCI and Advanced Format will prevent some of the diagnosis and fixing tools from working, they may even make more damage.

Last but not the least, I wonder why you are so clanged to XP. If you are trying to use old hardware with X220, I wonder what you will be using and strongly suggest you to drop the idea. If you are going to use some software that only supports XP, again I strongly suggest you to use XP Mode which if you enabled Intel VT will bring somewhat satisfying results.

Anyway good luck with it.