Fix: Blue Screen When Installing XP on Lenovo ThinkPad (IdeaPad) T61/X61/T400
Set the SATA Hard Drive to IDE Mode
If you get a blue screen while installing XP, or while using Ghost, all you need to do is:
Press F1 to enter BIOS -> SATA -> Compatibility (or IDE).
You do not need to read the article below the divider. In my case, I was installing a genuine copy of XP, and it blue-screened right after detection completed. This article merely gave me the idea.
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Set the SATA Hard Drive to AHCI Mode
Setting AHCI in the BIOS looks simple, but users who already have an operating system installed must not switch the hard drive mode casually, or they may get a blue screen when entering the system.
To solve this problem completely, the best method at present is to reinstall the operating system. But for most Windows XP users, the installation disc does not include SATA AHCI driver support. So we need to take a two-pronged approach:
Option 1
Install directly from an installation disc that already integrates SATA AHCI drivers, such as original Lenovo, Dell, or HP recovery systems. As long as AHCI mode for the hard drive is enabled in the BIOS before installation, the SATA AHCI driver will be loaded automatically during setup. This is the easiest method.
I do not think the method below is very useful, because my blue screen occurred during installation.
Option 2
If you cannot find such an integrated system disc, that is fine too. We can manually load the AHCI driver during the installation of the new system.
- Download the “Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver” from Intel’s official website.
Download link: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product_Search.aspx?Prod_nm=Intel%20Matrix%20Storage%20Manager%20driver&page_nbr=l&lang=zho
Be sure to download the appropriate version. For example, f6flpy32.zip is for 32-bit operating systems, while f6flpy64.zip is for 64-bit operating systems.
- Extract the downloaded driver package to obtain an executable file. Run it, and it will prompt you to create a SATA AHCI driver floppy disk.
- Set the SATA hard drive to AHCI mode in the BIOS.
- Install the operating system.
Traditional hard drives used the ATA interface. ATA was once the widely used standard related to IDE and EIDE devices. The current SATA standard is a hard drive interface specification proposed by Intel, IBM, Dell, APT, Maxtor, and Seagate: the Serial ATA interface. Compared with traditional ATA hard drive interfaces, SATA hard drives have three advantages: faster transfer speeds, hot-swap support, and higher execution efficiency.
However, to enjoy the “full-speed thrill” of a SATA hard drive, you must set the hard drive mode in the BIOS to AHCI mode. AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface. Only after enabling AHCI mode can you use advanced Serial ATA features in the storage driver, such as NCQ full-speed command queuing and hot-swap technology. According to reviews, after AHCI mode is enabled, hard drive performance is about 7% higher than under the same conditions without AHCI enabled.
However, most desktop motherboard SATA hard drives now use the traditional IDE mode by default, so when installing a system on a SATA hard drive, you do not need to install a SATA hard drive driver. To use AHCI mode, however, you need to install the SATA AHCI driver before installing the operating system. In addition, many motherboards now have a RAID mode for the hard drive interface, namely a disk array, which requires two or more hard drives to implement.
Take a two-pronged approach: be prepared before enabling AHCI mode.