Installing Windows XP on Lenovo X60 Tablet: harder than it seems

I was underestimated the difficult of installing Windows XP on my Lenovo X60 Tablet, and almost got into a point of no return.

The journey started after I used Acronis Disk Director Suite to resize the harddisk partition and created a 30+ Gb primary partition for XP. Everything seems OK until after I booted up the Win XP SP2 VLK disc. I got a blue screen of death at the end of startup sequence of the setup. Being puzzled, I tried Windows XP SP1 edition, and found that although I could get the setup application to boot up, the setup application couldn't see my internal harddisk at all!

Interestingly, the Windows Vista DVD disc can bootup properly, and the setup sequence can see both of my harddisk partition without problem. But then, installing a clean Vista is not my goal today. I want XP instead.

Frustrated, I try to roll back by booting up the Acronis Disk Director I installed on a 1Gb SD card. Horror striked when I found out that I COULDN'T boot that thumb drive up!

Fortunately, I still have a bootable Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 disc (SA-611). And even for that I have to press [F11] fast enough to get the boot sequence into loading the CDR disc properly. Finally I got to Acronis Disk Director, set the startup back to the bigger partition, and then reboot. Result: back to the original setup. But it really was scary.

So what next? Seems like I cannot install XP unless I have the base station for X60, which comes with a DVD Burner drive. Will I do that? No way. I am not shelling out extra money just to roll back to XP. There's actually more incentive for me to have a clean Vista install. But for now I have other better things to do that doing such.