Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Lenovo x60, x60s notebook: „cannot find boot drive“ problem

Lenovo x60/x60s notebooks are available with preinstalled Windows with an rescue "ThinkVantage" partition to restore OS in case of danger.


 

But once you try to add another Windows installation to your machine, you get problems.

That all starts with partitioning: you need a separate partition to install another Windows there. So get a partitioning tool and go ahead.

  • I failed to boot from USB drive (bootable for my desktop PC!) containing partitioning tools, so needed to have an USB CD-ROM since the box has no own CD-ROM neither slot for that purpose.
  • Booting from CD-ROM is also not funny since you need to load proper USB drivers supporting external CD-ROMs to be able to access CD-ROM files and programs after boot. I succeeded finally to boot from the _you_know_what_disk_I_mean disk while many other (free, shareware and license-based) distributives made me sick hanging the machine during the boot and making the box not responsible.

    Mind to boot DOS first, then select USB drivers with no EMM support, then select the second option (not all available drivers, but explicitly the second option!).
  • Well, once booted, then after some "dances with a drums and trumpets" I succeeded to split existing primary partition to two holding Windows on one of result partitions and second one as clean.
  • Now start to install Windows on the second partition: after brave copying setup bootstrap files, Windows restarts the machine and shows blue screen (error 0x00000007) which means "no boot disks" detected.
  • You may retry, scream and cry - whatever… the only solution is: restart the machine, go to BIOS settings and change the SATA HDD controller mode to "Compatibility". Do not forget to save the changes and restart the box again. Now you can setup Windows on the new partition as you may have done hundred times before.


Refer also: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-65345.html.


Enjoy!

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