One thing I tried: I have an old hard drive with W7 on it from a LT that crashed a while ago. I put that in the Lenovo and it tried to start Windows, went through the repair facilities and came up with an error. I think it can’t resolve the hardware conflicts. FYI
i was actually thinking that it might be the CD/DVD ROM drive that is hosed. Can you try to run that off another machine? If it doesn't boot on the other machine that's probably your problem.
*shrugs* I wouldn't expect Win7 to come up on different hardware and run... The hash tag off the hardware will be too far off... But it does prove the thing can boot. You could scrub your 80 off, put a 2g fat part on it and load DOS... If it will boot that, then you know your boot sector on the 80 is fine, and you can run DOS hardware diag software on it to determine what you have to work with.
As to the WINXP needed to complete the BIOS thing:
You CAN prepare a WinXP on another box... If you have a partition manager and a test bench machine:
on the 80g, Make a 10g. primary fat32 to shove the OS back (to allow room for the utility PART, which will have to be the first PART generally...
fill the rest of the drive (whatever... enough to get XP on is is all you need) with a primary NTFS PART, then Del the FAT PART.
Load it up new with XP, putting it in the NTFS PART (don't mind un-found drivers)... Then edit the reg to del the HKLM/Enum key...
Then put that hdd in the real box, boot direct to SAFE, let it find...Once it is running, boot normal, and do the deed with the BIOS thing
It will crap the XP Installation (MBR will now point to Utility part, NT suddenly on the 2nd Part instead of the 1st... Bootloader will die a cruel death)... but your utility part will be installed.... DEL the NT PART, and you are at square-one.
LOL! Dunno if you want to go to all that trouble just to find out it is a frisbee, but that oughta work.
Note that the readme for the BIOS upgrade Dead Corpse found does not state that it even has a utility partition - sounds more like an on-board flash = but I would do the above anyway, just in case (allows for a utility part if it needs it). One way or another, it seems to need the latest flash to 'fix boot problems' as the readme admits. Might look around for a DOS version of the flash utility, because it would be a whole lot easier to do with that : )