Thinkpads Forum

I recently purchased a used T60 which seems to operate very good except for the crapware installed especially Symantec firewall and virus items. It has to go through a rigamorrow just to trash an empty folder. I tried several methods to remove the Symantec apps but they seem to grow back! And even blocked my DSL connection. So I decided to replace XP with a copy I had from a dead PC. After a bit of chugging along during installation it states it cant find the hard drive!!! Then I figured I’d format “C” partition and start from a clean drive. Put in my DiskDirector CD and it can’t find the drive either! WTF! C was formatted to 50Gs and works under XP. What am I missing? Besides sanity. TYIA

You are missing the fact that XP is old and doesn't support SATA natively. You have to go to the BIOS and change the SATA settings from AHCI to Compatability. After that XP will be able to boot and see these devices no problem. You might want to install the drivers in device manager after you are all setup for AHCI and then change it back in the BIOS then XP will see it.

Thanks, you hit the nail straight on. I have a bad habit though of asking myself WHY? The original drive was SATA running XP Pro with all updates, so I would think the BIOS was set correctly? I now have an interesting situation where the original drive is NOT recognized when inserted into a BLACKX, THERMATAKE DOCKING STATION which works fine when another SATA drive is tried. The original drive was working fine when removed. This is after installing Win7 which was interesting loading into the T60 compared to my DT.

The original SATA drive was IBM/Lenovo formatted for SATA.
The second time, you tried to install without any SATA drivers. MBR must be confused as hell!
If you wipe that HD first (e.g. DBAN or Killdisk, free on the web, run for only a few minutes to wipe the first few sectors), then partition/format it, it will be usable again.

Thanks to both of you for the info. Got the new drive working smoothly so far and I'm next going to investigate imaging as I'm a strong BU person and like to make a complete fresh image each week so if needed can go back to say a 3 week old image. Currently use True Image with XP but am not sure of it's recovery health with Win7.

I use TI home 11.0 with Win7 64bit, no problems

Scott