Suported hard drive to upgrade my T61

[Calabrache]

Hi MBR I asked this question to EASUS "I want to migrate a HDD 100G to a HDD 320G running V U 32. The 100HDD is a laptop (lenovo) which has a service partition holding some recovery software. I would like to make sure the cloning using easus would also clone this partition and the system would remain bootable. Is that feasable ?" They replied this Actually, EASEUS Partition Master V4.1.1 can help you upgrade your hard disk from 100 HDD to a 320GB HDD with all the original partitions and data. You can use the Disk Copy function to achieve this: http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/disk-copy.htm You should close your computer immediately after the copy process finished (tick "Shut down the computer after changes are applied" option), and then disconnect one of your two hard disks to your computer (replace the old new with the new one), then you could boot your computer again. " I'll give it a try over the week. I share your comment about Lenovo (which by the way also droped dead the "old" users with Vista which are left to their own device for migrating to W7). I reckon i'll try both method. The apparently easiest and then the one from indie...

[Calabrache]

smdmbguy "If I bought a 320BG Scorpio Black and downloaded Acronis from WDs website, will that work as well?" it should as the blue or black WD line a basically the same product line. The HDD should be SATA minimum 1.5 (if you have purchased a SATA 3 no problem, but the t61 will no benefit from the sata 3g interface since lenovo for compatibility issue limited it to 1.5gb throughput). You'll have the same issue for the cloning provided you want also to recover the EISA partition for R&R

[smdmbguy]

Calabrache -

Thanks for the information. I would like to keep the EISA partition on the new drive as well. So did you use EASEUS Partition Master to clone your old hard drive including the EISA partition or just the partition? They

have another SW called TODO Back Up which seems to be good for upgrading from a smaller HDD to a bigger HDD including the partition.

smdmbguy

[Calabrache]

Hi smdmbguy

I plan to try cloning a HDD 100Go to a HDD 320Go this week end with EASUS and if it fails with CloneZilla. My objective is to have the EISA partition on the 320Go drive. Doing without is extremely simple. I'll intend to provide the results failed or success with a step by step so it could be usefull for other. In this forum and like in many other i've found plenty of good / usefull advise from other users who took the time to share their valuable knowledge. I reckon i ow this community the same.

TODO Back Up is EASUS http://www.todo-backup.com/

[smdmbguy]

Thanks Calabrache. What HDD are you using? I placed an order for a scorpio black 320GB w/o freefall detection.

I will await your results first with clonezilla.

smdmbguy

[MPF]

Any word on progress?  success or failures?

Thanks.

[Calabrache]

Indeed, sorry smdmbguy

i replied earlier on (SUN) but must have done somehting wrong because the text has vanished...

So here we are

- easus did copy the partitions, both, but I could neither boot the OS not the R&R partition. I had done a Recovery disk before and used it to reinstall the R&R backup. Amazingly the service partition has been deleted during this installation... I reckon easus does copy the partition but this is not a real clone

- clonezilla, gparted, i failed, what indie has done is way way above my capacities...

- then came paragon-software the partition manager... 100% raw hard risk cloning. All cloned, all worked (provided you ask the system to be shut down after the copy) 100%, the rescue partition is operational and os boots... Very simple to use and include a suite of additionnal functionalities, resize, + recovery cd, etc...

Hard disk

I looked at three :

seagate momentus,

wd black scorpio

and hitachi travelstar.

I went through technical notes (i m not an expert) and found the wb and the hitachi were closed. Hitachi has a lower current consumption, lower latency and higher shock absorbtion. But minimal, as it was only 10$ more and the retailer had it in stock i settled for it (320Go)

Hope that helps Best regards

[indie]

MPF: My reason for doing it this way was because I was after more than simply cloning the original disk. I wanted to change the partition layout so I could have a Linux /boot partition and use that in preference over NTLDR as it's more flexible. I also wanted to do a clean install of Windows from the Recovery partition to give it some more life back.

A simplified version of the method I described can be used to copy the Recovery partition and do a Factory Restore. Clonezilla only copies the files the files instead of sectors so it's much quicker to 'clone' as partition.
There's a special MBR used for RnR which allows you to access the Recovery partition, this has to be installed correctly or otherwise it won't start - I had numerious problems with this at first. It looks like it stores a few checksums in the MBR, from what I've seen from the RnR floppy disk, so this is one reason why it may fail to start.

It's really is quite easy to do using GParted/Clonezilla! If you're happy with using fdisk under Linux you could create the partition under Clonezilla instead.

Cloning the Recovery Partition

1. Take the original hard disk out of the laptop and place it in a USB caddy
2. Put the new hard disk into the laptop
3. Boot GParted, it will detect both drives.
     1) Note the size of the existing Recovery partition
     2) Create a partition#1 for windows on the new disk, no need to create a filesystem for it. Set type to 0x07 NTFS
     3) Create a recovery partition#2 of the same size or more than the existing one - set to 0x0C FAT32
     4) Set this partition as the bootable one
     5) You can manually move the slider around if you need to adjust the partition sizes
4. Reboot and load Clonezilla
5. Follow the on screen instructions to copy the recovery partition to the newly created one, probably /dev/sdb2 -> /dev/sda2. That's "device-device disk/partiton to disk/partition" mode. Exit to a shell
6. If your original disk is sdb and new one is sda, you can copy the MBR with the following linux command.

   dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=62
   sync

7. Reboot your system and try that. When it starts press F11 to go into RnR.
8. If for some reason it doesn't like the MBR then you'll have to create a 'RnR floppy', if you don't have a floppy drive you can do this using GRUB4DOS.

Creating a bootable USB stick of rnr40.img with GRUB4DOS

1. Get rnr40.img, I used Virtual Floppy Driver so I could create a floppy disk image for later.
2. Download GRUB4DOS and see the instructions here for making a bootable USB stick.
3. Copy rnr40.img to the USB stick.
4. Add the following to menu.lst to boot the rnr40.img:

   title Boot rnr40.img
   map --mem (hd0,0)/rnr40.img (fd0)
   map --hook
   chainloader (fd0)+1
   rootnoverify (fd0) 

5. Now use F12 to boot of the USB stick.
6. When the GRUB menu appears select the rnr40 option
7. Press F3 to get to the command line
8. Then type the following to remove the old MBR and install a new Lenovo MBR:

   cd A:\PE
   bmgr /R
   bmgr /Fboot.bin /M2

   The above can be used to fix the MBR for any situation. You can also add Clonezilla and GParted to the USB stick to save on CD's.

I hope the above is slightly more clearer than my original post for the newbies.

-Indie

[MPF]

indie:  thanks for the additional details and specific instructions & links.  I am afraid I am too insecure to chance my data (and any more time) with the free approach where I don't have enough understanding of what I am doing.

Calabrache: thanks for the update and on what was finally a succesful model.  I will breakdown and buy the Paragon Partition Master software and do it over the weekend.  One question: how did you resize the two partitions from the old disk onto the new one?  proportionately?  or did you keep the RnR as small as it had been? or something in between?

Thanks to all for their advice on this.  It seemed so easy when I first ordered a new hard drive!

[Calabrache]

Hi MPF,

Actually i did not changed the service partition size. I use paragon partition manager (the uk site has sometime some week sales) to do a DISK copy, to which i ask to shut down the pc, do a RAW copy. Then when that was done, and that i could reboot i used again PPM to extend the second partition (not the service partition which PPM sees as non formated and which is about 700MB) to use the max space. I did not touch the service partition.

Don't worry it always seem so easy at first glance, devils hides in the details.

Also thanks for INDIE and his additional specs. (btw the virtual floppy link in the first message ends elsewhere)

Let me know if i can be of any further help

Regards