How do I Reimage a SafeGuard Easy laptop?

Ah, see the problem here. The issue is that the XP installation CD doesn't support the hard drive controller - quite a common problem with this earlier OS. If you watch the boot sequence on the CD, you'll see it prompt you 'Press F6 for additional drivers' - This prompt allows you to add drivers during the installation process to the initial boot loader so that e.g. it can see the controller and then the drives attached to it. Now, it gets tricky here. F6 on the XP installation disk requires drivers to be stored on a floppy drive and there's not many floppy drives on laptops (or anything else) these days. So, the easiest method is to take your XP installation disk and use a tool called nLite to integrate the appropriate driver into it and burn a new CD with the new drivers that you can then boot and install from.

The T60 laptop I believe came with an intel ICH6 controler (Intel Matrix Storage Controller 82801Gx) which wasn't part of the original XP install. You can download the relevant driver to integrate with nLite from Lenovo's website under the 'storage' section and because it tends to be left out, it's under the windows 2000 section too.

I think some later XP installation disks which had SP3 integrated had this controller already so should work. Once you can see the disk, you can remove the encrypted partition (seen as 'non-dos partition') easily - you'll see this at the start of the setup and then install XP into the freshly unpartitioned space.

PM me if you get stuck, I should be able to assist.

Matt

Ah, see the problem here. The issue is that the XP installation CD doesn't support the hard drive controller - quite a common problem with this earlier OS. If you watch the boot sequence on the CD, you'll see it prompt you 'Press F6 for additional drivers' - This prompt allows you to add drivers during the installation process to the initial boot loader so that e.g. it can see the controller and then the drives attached to it. Now, it gets tricky here. F6 on the XP installation disk requires drivers to be stored on a floppy drive and there's not many floppy drives on laptops (or anything else) these days. So, the easiest method is to take your XP installation disk and use a tool called nLite to integrate the appropriate driver into it and burn a new CD with the new drivers that you can then boot and install from.

The T60 laptop I believe came with an intel ICH6 controler (Intel Matrix Storage Controller 82801Gx) which wasn't part of the original XP install. You can download the relevant driver to integrate with nLite from Lenovo's website under the 'storage' section and because it tends to be left out, it's under the windows 2000 section too.

I think some later XP installation disks which had SP3 integrated had this controller already so should work. Once you can see the disk, you can remove the encrypted partition (seen as 'non-dos partition') easily - you'll see this at the start of the setup and then install XP into the freshly unpartitioned space.

PM me if you get stuck, I should be able to assist.

Matt