Suported hard drive to upgrade my T61

[indie]

I recently upgraded my factory fitted Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00 120GB on my T61 with a Western Digital WD3200BEVT 320GB 2.5" Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 8MB Cache - OEM Scorpio Blue. It works a treat and is much faster than the original Hitachi drive. hdparam reported a read speed of about 32MB/s for the Hitachi and 58MB/s for the WD, now that is quite an improvement!

It was quite easy to upgrade aswell while retaining the Service Partition.

1. Put the new drive in the laptop and connected the old via USB - it's quicker that way around
2. Booted into Clonezilla (free) and used fdisk to create partition 4 at the end of the drive with type 0x12, it's actually a "Win95 FAT32 (LBA)" type 0x0C. This needs to be the same size or slightly more than the original.
3. Used Clonezilla to copy the SP to the newly created partition. The original drive can then be removed.
4. Then booted into GParted and used that to resize the SP down by about 1GB
5. I used the Recovery Repair Disk (v4) to fix the MBR on the new drive. When it boots press F3 to get to the command prompt, cd to A:\PE. Use "bmgr /Fboot.bin /M2" to install the MBR and  "bmgr /R" to remove the existing IBM MBR. With the partitions changed I found that I had to update the MBR by removing the existing one and then reinstalling it. There's a nice program called Virtual Floppy Driver that allows you to mount an image as a floppy disk if you haven't got a physical floppy disk drive.
6. You should now be able to boot into the Rescue and Recovery environment on the new disk by pressing the ThinkVantage button or F11 key.

When you preform a factory recovery of windows RnR installs it to the first partition, this is fine if all you want to use is Windows. However, I wanted a small /boot partition so I could also boot into Linux and have GRUB loaded before the windows boot loader - when windows is hibernated you can't boot anything else.

So I created a 50GB Partition 1 as NTFS(0x07), 200MB Partition(2) as Ext2(0x83), the rest as an Extended(0x05) Partition(3). Oriinally I had the NTFS and Ext2 partitions the other way around and RnR tried to install into the 200MB partition!! - it changed it to NTFS.

Once the SP had done it's inital install and rebooted - before it begins to install windows for propper. I booted back into GParted. I then removed the Ext2 Partition 2, Moved the Windows NTFS Partition 1 to the right leaving 200MB on the left for the Ext2 partition. I used fdisk to fixup the partition order makeing the Ext2 partition 1 and NTFS partition 2. I was then able to install GRUB on /dev/sda1 and use that to continue the installation of Windows. The IBM bootmanager doesn't pay attention to the active bit in the MBR and instead boots the first partition. The only thing I changed about the initial install of Windows was to C:\boot.ini to update the partition it booted - from 1 to 2.

Clonezilla and GParted can both be booted from a USB stick as a normal Linux kernel/initrd. The rnr40.fdd floppy image can be directly booted from USB stick using GRUB4DOS

-Indie

[MPF]

As a newbie struggling to clone my XP disk from the T61 (250G) onto a new 500 GB drive, I am wondering why you went through all those steps rather than just having Clonezilla just do a disk-to-disk cloning.  I have tried to do this unsuccessfully over the past 2 weeks using Acronic and Macrium.  I was going to try Clonezilla next, which seemed to be very simple, but your post has left me completely confused.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Calabrache]

Hi MPF,

Have you been trying to clone you HDD 250G to a 500G using Acronis True Image ? Could you explain a bit more what does not work. I'm about to consider using Acronis True Image to do the same, but if you say it does not work, that would spare me the pain... What does not work ?

I would like to do exactly what indie has done (at least keeping the EISA boot up partition) but as also a newbie it might be challenging.....

Thanks you for your comments

[MPF]

Okay, here is the list of materials:

1.  Lenovo T61 with a Hitachi 250 GB internal drive (nearly full)

2. New Hitachi 500 GB drive

3. USB/SATA external mount

First try:

Original disk in place, new disk as external on USB port.

Acronis True Image used to CLONE internal to external (auto mode) -- done from within XP

Took 5+ hours.

At end, external drive looked to have all of internal contents on it

BUT when swapped into the internal bay, would not boot.

Second try:

Took original disk out and put it into USB box

Put new drive into internal bay

Booted of Acronis CD

Even though boot menu saw internal drive, Acronis would not identify it to use as target for clone.

Third try:

Original disk back in place.

Another USB drive attached to computer

Acronis used to make full disk image backup

New disk swapped into internal bay.

Booted off Acronis CD

Attempted to restore onto new drive from image BUT Acronis again could not see the internal drive if the USB drive was attached at the boot OR could not see the external drive when it was attached after the boot.

I'm about at the end of things and was going to try Clonezilla until I read the confusing (to me) and complicated sets of steps required by indie.

Hopefully someone will talk both of us through this.

[andyP Community SuperMod]

---

MPF wrote:

Second try:

Took original disk out and put it into USB box

Put new drive into internal bay

Booted of Acronis CD

Even though boot menu saw internal drive, Acronis would not identify it to use as target for clone.

---

Was the Acronis cd the original installation cd, which is bootable, or a rescue cd you created using Acronis' tools?

If the former is true, create the latter and you should be home and dry.

[MPF]

Rescue CD I created (bought Acronis as a download without a CD)... tried both the "safe" mode and the "full" mode but it wouldn't see the internal drive and the external device with the backup image at the same time.

[LinYu]

MPF and Calabrache,

I did what MPF tried to do using Acronis True Image except, my new HD was the same size as the old one. 

This is what I did:

My old HD broke down while my T61p was in warranty, so Lenovo sent me a new drive. I replaced the drives, booted with the ORIGINAL disk from Acronis and recovered from a recent backup of my broken drive, which I had in an external USB hard drive.

I had NO PROBLEMS, whatsoever. When the recovery finished, my computer rebooted automatically and I was flying again. As simple as this.

So, the only issue I see here is the different sizes of your drives. Would that be enough to cause the problems you described?

This is very relevant to me also, because I'm planning to upgrade to a larger capacity drive and I was confident I could easily do it the same way as before. Now, I'm no longer so sure...

Please keep us posted about any progress you make with this issue.

Thanks and best regards.

[Calabrache]

Hi MBR Did you tried this http://kb.acronis.com/content/2931 in the forum we can also find http://forum.acronis.com/forum/4462

[smdmbguy]

If I bought a 320BG Scorpio Black and downloaded Acronis from WDs website, will that work as well?

[MPF]

Is there something about the MBR for the T61 that is making this not work?

When I try to boot off the Acronic Boot CD I cannot see an external USB drive (not using SAFE mode) so I can't do it that way.

I have now spent an entire day trying to do this with Macrium Reflect:

1.  Made a disc image to an external drive

2.  Use the RESTORE command to move that image to my new drive (mounted as an external USB drive) (included with re-write MBR).

3.  Swapped the new drive into the T61.

4.  Would not boot (blinking cursor in upper left of screen).

5.  Put original disc back in and rebooted (I always worry about this).

6.  Restarted T61 and forced boot of new drive as external USB (with F12).

7. Started to boot into XP but quickly went to BSOD.

Is this some nifty Lenovo trick to prevent us from being able to upgrade hard drives?  I'm getting frustrated and might just give up, by new machine with Windows 7 and walk about from Lenovo completely.

MPF