Some Additional Information & a Question
I'm trying to downgrade an X200 using my customer's XP (upgrade) installation CD (w/ valid PID), and the setup is failing after all the drivers have been loaded and Windows Setup is started, with a BSOD of a "07" error (I can give the specific BSOD error number later, but it refers to New Hardware, Viruses, hard drive erros, and suggests running "chkdsk /f".
The drive is malware and error free.
Hiren's (v. 10) boots to the "Mini XP" just fine, so the optical drive is working. Setup also fails in the same way when I attempt to install with an XP OEM disk (not an "upgrade" version).
At this point, my current theory is that the X200 (Thinkpad) is so hardware-specific and picky, that only the factory installation disk for XP will work, and that any attempt at installing XP from a standard Installation CD will fail. I hope I'm wrong, and am hoping someone can tell me that they've been able to successfully install a Vista-to-XP downgrade using a standard XP Installation disk, and how they were able to do it.
Another thought that I have is that, due to the way that the partitions of the hard drive were structured (there are three), the XP Installation disk may be trying to write it's installation files to one of the two Recovery Partitions, which are protected in some (possibly IBM-specific) way. So, I'm hoping to verify if this is true, and how to get around it. Perhaps it's possible to point to the middle partition (where Vista is currently installed) somehow, instead of a protected Recovery Partition. Why there are two, and what their different purposes are, I don't know.
Any help would be appreciated. I've enabled the ability to recieve e-mails from Members, so I would welcome a direct response. I'll also monitor this thread in case something helpful is posted here.