Ideapad y710 issues?

I need some assistance with those of you who are familiar with the problems I'm having. I tried to search through the forums and find information that was already posted but could not find specific solutions to the problems I'm facing. Please forgive me if I did not search thoroughly enough. If you could PM me about solutions you may have please do so. I tend to solve problems better when I can communicate with a person one-on-one.

I just recently purchased a Ideapad Y710. It only had a 5400 rpm hard drive, and I really wanted a 7200 RPM hard drive. I had a 200 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 Hard Drive sitting in another laptop so I just decided to swap drives. However the hard drive from the older computer came out of an Asuss notebook with the operating system and all the drivers for that particular computer already loaded on the hard drive. Now that I have swapped the drives I am not able to completely reformat the hard drive and install Windows XP. When I put in the Windows XP CD, and boot from the CD, the system tells me that it is not able to find any applicable hard drives to install the OS, it says that it is either not plugged in correctly or cannot initialize the drive, but I know for a fact that the drive is plugged in correctly and it is receiving power. Any ideas? I'm thinking it has something to do with the hard drive being on a different computer and for some reason the drive cannot be detected. Any assistance you may have would be greatly appreciated.

Second, it was shipped with two CDs, however neither of the two CDs seem to have the operating system on them. How can I get it back up copy of the operating system that was already loaded on the computer when I purchased it?

Also, I'm having difficulties installing a second hard drive in the second hard drive bay. Are there any diagrams available for installing a secondary hard drive?

One more thing the computer when shipped with Vista originally on it and I can't stand it. So I really want to put Windows XP on it, if that wasn't already stated above in my posting. Thanks.

 

Your chipset does not have native drivers for XP (so your SATA drives are not seen). You can either slipstream the chipset drivers into the XP disc using nLite, or install Vista. Your choice.

You might also have a "compatability" or "ATA" mode listed in your BIOS under hard drive options. That would also solve the problem, but you'd suffer a performance loss on the drive.

 

How do I slipstream? Where do I get the native xp drivers for my chipset?

 

It's the XP disc that lacks the SATA drivers it needs to see your hard drive during the installation. You may wish to look at the XP Clean Install Guide. While it's intended to be used for ThinkPads, step two in particular should shed some light on the matter. On ThinkPads, I'm not sure if it's the same on the IdeaPads, you can set the drive to compatibility mode in the BIOS, which will enable the XP installer to see the hard disc.

Link

 

Thanks for your replies so far. So I finally figured out how to slipstream all the drivers a new service pack into an iso. This may seem like a really dumb problem but I'm having difficulties burning an iso to a DVD, it's probably something I am doing incorrectly. I'm using nero to burn the iso but it's wanting a recordable CD rather than a DVD? How do I get around this? Do I burn the iso to a DVD in data mode? What's the trick? Are iso images already bootable or do I need to add something to the DVD to make it bootable? I don't have any recordable CDs on hand only recordable DVDs.

 

XP usually comes on a CD.

 

No.

fiasco1, just do it like the guide ZaZ posted, change to "Compatibility" mode to boot with the XP CD, after install, you will switch it back to SATA later, not to worry. Download this driver from the ThinkPad support site, your Y710 has the same chipset/controller, trust me, I tried on my Y310a, the Y710 has the same chispet/controller too.