Also trying to install XP on a Thinkpad R52 (P4-1.73GHz, 256MB). This laptop came without a HDD, and the catch is - its BIOS supports only a very narrow range of drives. Any drive outside of that range will give you an error 2010 at boot, and won't function correctly. Here's a page detailing the problem: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_no … kPad_hard_disks
I don't have any of the drives on that list (I wasn't aware of the problem when I ordered the laptop). Installed a Fujitsu 60GB drive that I had around, gives me error 2010 but continues to try and boot. Used an external USB FDD to boot a DOS 6.22 disk; fdisk sees the HDD as a 8GB one only. Made a 2GB FAT partition and installed DOS on it just to see if it will boot. On reboot it gives the 2010 error again of course, but then it proceeds to boot DOS.
I then tried installing XP to this unsupported drive anyway; made XP into a bootable USB drive and installed from there. Repartitioned the drive from the installer to remove the DOS partition and make a NTFS partition instead. The installer copies all the files to the partition and then reboots. Then I get the error 2010 again, and then it stops with "disk read error"
Guess that won't work.
Fortunately I was able to find cheaply on ebay a lot of 2 of the supported drives (Fujitsu MHV2060AH) and am waiting for them to be delivered. For the heck of it I also ordered an Ultrabay Enhanced HDD adapter which should work with this laptop, because drives installed in this manner apparently don't suffer from the error 2010 problem (the downside being that you have to remove the DVD/CDRW unit).
FWIW the Ultrabay HDD adapter part number is 41N5661. I'm placing this here for reference in case anyone else needs it, because I spent more than an hour trying to figure it out from compatibility lists, old IBM technical documents and forum discussions. There are many variations of the Ultrabay devices which are incompatible with each other, but this one should work on the R52.
I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O