Seeking opinion -- ugrading T61 from 160 GB to 320 GB

[Bajpai]

Thanks very much. I very much hope that I don't get into such situations again

Sushil

[Puttagee]

Thanks All for sharing, I may end-up doing this myself.....

[freemanluk]

I think you should just use the recovery discs to reinstall the whole system.

[aminga]

I have a similar situation and still can not boot from WD 320GB SATA drive.  My T61P came with a SATA 100GB drive and I have a lot of installed software that I need to transfer to new 320GB drive without reinstalling them.

My laptop came preloaded with WinXP (company policy) and NO installation disks.

Here's what I have done many times do far:

1- I have Acronis "workstation 9" and "home 11" installed on my laptop.

2- The WD 320GB drive is installed in an external enclosure with USB 2.0 connection to laptop.

3- I start the Acronis and do a "disk clone" from internal 100GB to external 320GB drive with "As Is" option, so I end up with about 220GB unallocated space.  This ok for me for now.

4- Operation finishes successfully (with either Acronis "workstation 9" or "home 11" ).

5- I remove the internal drive and replace it with cloned 320GB external drive.

6- Turn laptop ON and it displays the Thinkpad logo and tries to boot into 320GB drive which is now inside the laptop.

7- I only get a back text mode screen with a blinking cursor.  Nothing else happens and no other hard disk activity is seen.

I contacted Acronis thru their live chat support, but they do NOT help me unless I buy the maintenance option.  I sent their support an email with my problem and NO response at all yet.

I tried to get Lenovo tech support, but they want to charge me $69 per each call.

I had a Dell prior to this with no problem cloning my hard drive (I do it weekly) and Dell customer support is much more responsive than both Lenovo and Acronis.

Has anyone encountered this problem?

Message Edited by aminga on 05-25-2008 02:25 PM

Message Edited by aminga on 05-25-2008 02:25 PM

[goretsky Community Moderator]

Hello,

Have you verified that the 100GB partition on the new Western Digital 320GB hard disk drive is marked as active (or startable) so that the computer knows that is the disk volume from which to load the operating system at boot time?

You might also want to check Acronis' own support forum here. 

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

[aminga]

Yes I checked it and it is set as active.  I also checked it with Linux "System Rescue CD" and verified with that also (my desktop PC's OS is Linux).  I even copied the first 4 sectors of boot sector from 100G (good) drive to 320G drive and still did not work.
I did not find anything at Acronis help forums and chat to customer support was useless because I do not have maintenance plan with them.  Although I have a legitimate and registered Acronis software, still they were not interested in helping me.

But I found a solution for my problem.
I am using a drive backup software, for several years, from Future System Solutions which is called "Casper XP".  I installed that and did a drive copy with administrator's privileges and it did not complete the back up because a few files were in use.  I booted in "safe mode" and it did completed the drive backup successfully.  I replaced the drive and put the 320GB Western Digital drive in my laptop and it booted without any problem.  I am using it for 3 days now and have not seen any problem at all.

[JanJL]

Patience, patience , patience and then some more patience.

Just completed a successful upgrade on a T23 from 60 GB to a 120 GB primary hard disk.

Acronis True Image (using Home v.11) gives very little feedback on whether it is continuing to work or is hung up due to the long waits at times. Especially true during the initial kick off of the restore from the Recovery CD and USB drive with the backup copy. I was using USB 1.1 (it is a T23) and that did not help speed.

Net : 60 GB drive with 48 GB used, needed 13 hours to make the full HDD backup to the USB drive; then needed 27 hours to restore the 48 GB to an installed new, larger drive.

[JanJL]

With all this experience fresh in my mind, I did a hard disk upgrade on my T60; 100GB to a 250 GB. Used Acronis True Image Home 11, latest version. 

All the patience, patience, patience expressed in my previous post disappeared. On the T60 using USB 2.0 attached external drive; 80 GB backed up and then restored. Time for Acronis backup : 1 hour ! ; time for restore to new, installed hard disk : 1.5 hours !

It there really that big a transfer speed difference between USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 ?