I purchased a 3000-N200 with Win Vista Basic. Its is not illegigble for a factory downgrade, but apparently it is possible.

At the beginning of XP set-up, after pressing F6, everything seems fine, the floppy is read I can select the proper driver and setup continues...  Bu when setup is ready to copy files to the harddrive, setup stops and asks for the "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" floppy in drive A:/.    The thing is that the disc is still in the floppy. It is like the USB floppy is not connected.  What is wrong?

I have made the floppy several different times. I have unplug and re-inserted the USB drive. 

I can disable the ACHI, and run XP setup fine, but the ACPI driver (or something like that) is installed.  Later when loading software the WinDVD program from Lenovo website does not recognize the manufacturer and stops.

Please help...

Gotta ask, all that for Win DVD?:smileyindifferent:

One thing to try is enter BIOS, and under Advanced tab,

make sure Legacy Usb is enabled.

Its not only WinDVD, other Lenovo software was coming up inelligle machine type...

Plus, I want ACHI performance...

I read about nLite auto XP installer..  I'm going to try that solution to integrate ACHI drivers in the install batch...

The real issue is ACHI support for installing XP pro...

PS Legacy usb was enabled...

It reads the floppy at the beginning of the XP setup, but not when setup asks later, before writing to HD...

OK, understood.

I really don't know why the floppy drive would dissapear. Strange.

Did you just build a standard disk with the Intel drivers?

I have used Nlite to slipstream XP service packs, and it worked great

for that purpose. I never did try to add ahci driver.

nLite is my savior. I have not finished the install, but once setup did not complain that no harddrive was present, I'm thinking I'm hone free. I just included the ACHI driver in nLite with the chipset drivers and it seems to be working...

I'll post the final verdict later...

Good deal.

Did you add just the one ahci driver, or the whole bunch?

And I see you are already passing on the driver install process.:smileyhappy:

In the version of nLite I used, two options were available load Single driver or Folder of drivers. Since I was not certain of which ACHI .inf files were needed, I elected folder option. I also took the precaution of excluding the SCSI/RAID drivers from my XP disc (it was suggested by nLite). I also, loaded the chipset drivers. By then I was tired and burnrt-out, so I gave-up on trying to extract drivers from driver executable programs where no .infs were avaialabe. The biggest burden was integrating all of the updates and hotfixes, about 90 of them. I was fortunate that I got my machine running with ACHI disabled earlier. After all of the updates were complete during the earlier install, I went back to windows update site and printed the list of updates. I was hoping to manually downloading them in anticipation of Microsoft abandoning support of XP. Downoading all of them was a burden, but now they are all integrated on the nLite install disk. Cool.

On a scale of success from 1 to 10, I'll vote 7 or 8. The primary goal of loading ACHI was completely succesful! It seems the chipset drivers did not load properly, since after the nLite install the first addition driver install I attempted to install, the wireless network, failed to recognize the hardware and stopped. It just manually reloaded all drivers and lenovo software.

Only a few problems exist. I could not load rescue and recovery. The error message said this software was only for IBM and Lenovo machines. I thought I had a Lenovo...  There must be some signature like component that is registered in the operating system that is missing or since Lenovo does not authorize a downgrade for Vista Basic, they exclude my machine type. I'm not sure. I again had this problem with Intervideo winDVD. I can't read DVD format, and thus can't load some apps. I tried to share a DVD drive from my desktop but that didn't work either.

Any suggestion?

Glad you got it up and running, thanks for the nlite info.

I think you should start a new post on the software problem so

as not to clutter up this solved one.

Mods, if this is not correct, advise.

I was thinkin the same...

Thanks.