Install SATA drivers on Lenovo R61e

Lenovo R61e thinkpad came with Vista pre-installed.

The owner wants Vista removed and XP Pro installed.

XP Pro install reports "Hard drive not found".

No problem: I push F6 to install SATA driver. XP install insists on a stiffy drive. The laptop does not have a stiffy drive.

I downloaded the SATA driver from IBM and extracted it and then added it to the Driver section of nLite, but laptop fails to see the resulting disk as valid.

I tried "compatibility" and "AHCI" settings in BIOS. No luck.

I am stuck.

Any ideas?

No nLite gurus here?

I only use it occasionally

zenabi, it sounds like you have done everything correct.
the only place i think you could have gone wrong is
1) incorrect driver (this does happen)
or
2) when you added the driver in nlite, there is a checkbox , labelled either "textmode" or "boot mode" or similar...which means the driver is available during the textmode phase of setup, perhaps that wasnt checked.

setting the bios to compatibility or legacy should remove the need for an f6 driver, but you have tried that...weird.

if it is an intel controller, i would suggest hopping to intel.com and getting the driver direct from there...just find a corresponding desktop motherboard with same chipset (ich7/ich8/ich9) and grab their f6 driver. the iastor.inf contains both mobile and desktop variants.