Thinkpads Forum

I’m going a little crazy right now and hoping that someone can help me out.

I just purchased a new Lenovo x200 laptop and an Intel 160GB X-25M SSD. I put the new hard drive in the laptop and booted from the Windows 7 DVD that I burned. Everything is fine until I get to the “Where do you want to install Windows?” screen which lists the drives and partitions available. I have gone through this screen under several scenarios (don’t ask me how I’ve gotten these scenarios), and have not been able to get a successful install on any of them. The scenario I’m in right now is that there are no drives or partitions listed on which I can install Windows 7. There is a “Load Driver” option so I downloaded the firmware update tool for the drive (this is the only download available for the drive on Intel’s site) and attempted to load the driver to no avail. The second scenario I can get to is by doing a full un-provision on the drive. Once I do this, there are three items listed on the “Where do you want to install Windows?” screen: 100MB Unallocated, 100MB Partition 0 (System), and 149GB Partition 1 (Primary). I’ve tried two things under this scenario. First, I’ve tried formatting the Primary partition. When attempting to do so, I get an error saying that the partition cannot be formatted. The second thing I’ve tried is just selecting that drive to do the install on. I do this and get to the next step where it appears Windows 7 is being installed, and then moments later I get an error saying that Windows 7 was unable to create a partition on the drive.

Pleeeeease help. It’s driving me crazy and I’ve run out of ideas.

Try installing Vista, and then use Acronis Disk director or any other partition editing software to make one whole partition on your laptop. That's what I did.
Using my X200 with X25-M with updated firmware and Windows 7.

Did you do it that way because you ran into the same problems I'm describing or for another reason?

I just booted from an XP install CD and got bluescreeen error after it finished loading setup files. I've also booted into DOS and tried formatting the drive to no avail. This doesn't look good...

Is there some type of setting I need to change on the drive? Did my multiple "un-provisions" mess something up?

Grr...

Just as a check, in BIOS do you set the mode to Compatibility? XP doesn't understand AHCI (unless you slipstream the Intel Matrix driver with your XP installation disk of course)
I can't remember very well, but I remember seeing one extra partition of 100MB after performing the update. I installed Vista into the big partition, use Disk Director to combine the partitions, then reinstall Windows 7 a short while after.