This occurred BEFORE the Middleton BIOS was installed, but with the last Lenovo BIOS installed.
System: X61T 1.6 gHz, SXGA+, 4GB, Windows 7 Pro/SP1, Western Digital WD10JPVT 1TB drive.

I built up a Windows 7 system in a 160GB partition. The build was substantially complete, with all the Microsoft updates installed. I was into "personalizing" the machine, when I noticed that the AHCI driver was listed as the Microsoft generic. So I installed "Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver", version 8.9.2.1002 , from the Lenovo download page.

A little while later, I noticed I was having a cumulatively strange experience, as the system then began to crumble, failing to find bits and pieces of itself. At this point, I did not know whether it was memory, cpu, or something else. I considered trying to repair, but I figured so many little things might be missing, the only option was to start from scratch.

So I wiped the disk and started again. I decided to remove the Intel Matrix Storage driver as an element of suspicion, so I installed it early. As soon as I did so, the weirdness began again. This time, I quickly backed out the driver install, and continued to build the system. Since that time, a month ago, the system has been completely stable, I've burned the Middleton BIOS, upgraded the wifi card, no problems.

The only nagging thing is that, even with the Middleton BIOS, but not the Intel Matrix Storage driver, which I dare not install, the "devices" AHCI entry indicates Microsoft generic AHCI 1.0. Is this a complication specific to the Western Digital 1TB drive? Does anyone else have stories? I note that, on the Lenovo site, there were firmware updates for the drives they were using in manufacture.

Did you find a driver for the WD drive?

The driver has nothing to do with what hard drive is installed; it's the driver for the controller.

I don't know if this will help but I have windows 7 installed with think vantage system update 4 and this driver you are talking about sits in recommended updates but when I tried to install it from system update it always fails so I installed the driver from the intel update site instead and it works just fine.

The problem manifested in exactly the same way when genning W7 on a T500. As soon as the Intel chipset driver was installed, the system fell apart, with exactly the same symptoms. Rolling the driver back to the W7 distributed AHCI 1.0 version fixed it.

In the case of the T500, there is a solution. I downloaded the Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology) driver:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... y&lang=eng

This provides the T500 with AHCI 2.0 functionality with the Western Digital 1TB drive, and it works. So I tried installing it on the X61, but the install quits, indicating that the X61 does not have the hardware requirements.

It looks like the X61/T61 driver package needs some work.

This has been resolved.

1. The problem had nothing to do with the brand of disk drive; it is exactly the same with Seagate. It probably occurs with all Advanced Format drives.

2. The generic Microsoft AHCI 1.0 driver works without problems. However, it is possible to cause Windows to recognize the SATA hardware as Intel by downloading and executing the file infinst_autol.exe from the Intel website here:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... _autol.exe

This is an executable file, which detects Intel hardware, and installs appropriate infs, causing Microsoft to apply the appropriate device drivers. The actual SATA driver is Intel specific, but signed by Microsoft.

I could not detect any difference in performance between the generic Microsoft AHCI 1.0 driver, and the Intel driver. But if the Middleton BIOS was burned, it might enable SATA 2.0.

Since the correct Intel driver is available, Lenovo should update the X61 support packages to install it. The "Intel Matrix" storage driver wrecks file systems, and should not be on the Lenovo support site.