Windows XP forum: Windows xp installation disk cant detect c drive in IBM T61

I just got 2 Lenovo brand, model T61 laptops in from a company we just started working with. We usually buy Dells but decided to change it up. When the laptops came in they had Vista Ultimate as the OS. We load XP Pro on all of our boxes so this won't do... I figured that I would just insert an XP Pro CD in at boot and boot to disc and then reformat it and be on my way. When I get to the part in the XP setup where you choose the drive partitions to delete/create, etc. the setup says "no hard drive was detected on your system". These laptops are brand new so I know there wasn't some kind of hard drive failure. I changed the boot order to boot to hard disk first, restarted and then Vista loads and I get onto the desktop w/ start menu and everything. No hard disks? Right...

I then used one of my Ghost boot disks that I created so that the laptop booted right into the Ghost 8 GUI. I clicked Local>Disk>Check and a message comes up saying "no local fixed dics were detected". I figured that Ghost would work but I was wrong...

The laptops come with software and a special boot option to load recovery options, etc. which I hate. I just want 1 partition and want it to be WinXP Pro based. I don't want a D:\ Recovery partition and then a C:\ Primary. That's nice if it's for your personal use and it's at home but not for work when my job is to work on the recovery of your laptop if need be.

Is there any way to reformat this thing? I need to build it for someone starting soon and I've spent the last day now trying to figure out how to just reformat it!