Thinkpads Forum

I just bought a refurb'ed T61 with Vista Home Premium. I can't stand Vista and want to do a clean install of XP. I have T42 XP Pro Rescue and Recovery from my original T42 which was recently stolen...hence the new T61 with a 4:3 screen. I chose RESTORE TO FACTORY DEFAULT when I booted into Rescue Disk. But it failed to run with error message. Okay...it was for a IBM BIOS and I now have a Lenovo BIOS.

So, I tried to just load a fresh copy of XP Home that I have...everything seemed to go okay with the initial loading of SETUP files. When it came to INSTALL FRESH COPY, it failed to find a hard drive! And could not continue. What is going on? I have never had this problem. I just normally go in and delete the R&R and Preload partitions, reformat, and load a clean install.

What am I doing wrong? 1. The T42 R&R doesn't work on T61??
2. XP Home won't find the Hard Drive to install??

Two strikes and I am out!

Help...please.

I'm fairly certain that the T42 restore discs only work for the T42 family, not the T61.. They have different FRU numbers at least.

As for the second issue, have you tried checking that the SATA mode in BIOS is set to Compatibility? There could be problems if set to AHCI and you don't have the Intel matrix storage drivers slipstreamed onto the disc.

That was it! Set it to compatibility and off it went installing.

Thank You!!