This is mainly for information regarding a laptop I have. It's an IBM Lenovo N200 and came with Windows XP Pro installed. The problem is that it was loaded with resource hungry programs so I thought I would use my own copy of Windows XP that I have customised with everything I need. The HDD is a SATA so I went through the usual steps of downloading the SATA drivers from IBM and putting on floppy disk etc. IT DIDNT WORK!! It found the HDD and let me partition etc but then had a problem loading the SATA drivers so windows wouldn't install! Bearing in mind I have already formatted the partitions so i'm without an OS. Solution :- Go into the bios by restarting the laptop and holding down F1 then change the setting for the HDD from AHCI to IDE mode. Windows see's the HDD and installs without 3rd party drivers etc. Hope this helps anyone else having this issue. Regards Scott

Thanks for the headups. The consequences of switching from AHCI mode to IDE mode and vice versa under Windows are fully explained in the following link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanc... i_Xp/VistaUser

BTW you wrote It's an IBM Lenovo N200 and came with Windows XP Pro installed Are you sure the N200 laptop didn't come with Windows Vista Ultimate preinstalled as the review below indicated? http://www.notebookreview.com/defau... If that is true, were you downgrading Vista to XP using Lenovo downgrade DVDs obtained from the following page? http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s... i_Xp/VistaUser

XPUser I work in a school so I specified to my supplier that I needed XP Pro. These where delivered with XP Pro pre installed from IBM. I actually wondered why we could still get XP Pro so I looked here :- http://www.pc.ibm.com/uk/notebook/3... For anyone out there that works in a UK primary school then Vista doesn't work very well with the internal networks, especially with 2003 server. I am in the northwest so other towns might have a different set up. The standard XP install from IBM came to around 7gb so I installed our own copy (which i have Nlite'd) and with all the MS updates, Office 2003 and all our educational titles it still only comes to 7.5gb!! HTH Scott

Just as a fyi, if it sure the hdd and let you format, then the drivers must be working ok as it won't even give you the partition list if you dont have satas. Are you sure you didn't have some funny partitioning instructions in winnt.sif that just happened to conflict with the partitions on the lappy?

I created the partions from scratch. The problem was the SATA drivers where on a floppy disk and the floppy disk was in a USB floppy drive, it loaded the files from the floppy with no problems but then when it came to loading windows files from the cd it could no longer see the USB floppy drive and was looking for files on it, thats when the fun started. Works a treat now though :-) much faster than the OEM install that shipped from IBM.