Thinkpads Forum

Hi all-I need some input from the Thinkpad gurus out there. I've been trying to upgrade the hard drive on my T41 for the last several weeks and have had no luck. I first ordered a Western Digital Scorpio WD1200VE 120GB from Newegg. After hooking it up to a 2.5" USB enclosure I already had, it wouldn't mount. I've had smaller drives that mounted in the past using the same enclosure so I thought it was a bad drive. Newegg then sent a replacement, which subsequently didn't mount either. Then I thought it was an incompatibility w/ my enclosure so I ordered a different one from Newegg. A few days later the new enclosure came and my new hard drive STILL wouldn't mount. At this point I was already pretty discouraged. I ordered one more thing from Newegg-a PATA to USB cable. This cable didn't help either, so I sent everything back to Newegg, including the 120gb hard drive. I then ordered a Seagate Momentus hd, this time choosing a smaller 80gb version thinking maybe it was the 120gb capacity that was preventing all the enclosures from working with the drive. I received the 80gb yesterday...and it won't mount either. The same thing happens: it looks good at first (e.g. after plugging it into the USB port, you see in the XP toolbar that it sees the drive and I get the Your New Hardware Is Ready to Use message, but after that, the drive doesn't show up under My Computer; the same thing happens when I simultaneously plug the second USB plug in with the AC power feed).

Am I doing something wrong? Is there some Bios tweak I should be making? Should I be initializing the drive first before I start to see it? Like most of the drives Newegg sells, the one I bought was an OEM bare drive that didn't come with any documentation or CD-Roms.

YES.

After the drive is recognized you still have to give it a "disk signature," and you still need to partition and format it.

Go to CONTROL PANEL->ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS->DISK MANAGEMENT

Most probably at that point you'll get a popup that asks if you want to give the disk a "signature." Indicate that yes, you do

If this popup doesn't open then left click the disk on the left side (not where the unformatted space is shown, where the name of the disk is shown). Give it a signature.

Then you need to have the disk manager service create a partition or partitions, and instruct that they be formatted.

Voila! you will have your recognized drive (or drives should you partition into more than one logical drive) and they will be formatted and recognized by the operating system.

Hallelujah! That did the trick. Many, many thanks!

Many thanks to Ken Fox - reading this posting has saved me hours in the near future.
I need to upgrade my son's R40e 2684-5AG (XP/SP2) hard drive from 20GB to 40GB. I don't have a separate disk enclosure but I do have DOS Ghost 2003 (which works fine with USB external hard drive, with DOS running on USB floppy disk) to help me clone the disk.

I plan to take a Ghost backup on the USB hard drive, then remove the old disk, install the new one... and then what??!

I won't have an XP operating system with which to do the disk signature operation described above, so how do I put the signature on the new disk? Does the signature get installed as part of the installation of drivers and firmware as described here:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62282

Or can I get a bootable version of the disk signature sotware?

Or will the the disk signature be part of the cloned Ghost image? (I think not, because new disk size will not match old signature)

Thanks in advance....

simonbrew wrote: I plan to take a Ghost backup on the USB hard drive, then remove the old disk, install the new one... and then what??!

You don't need to put a disk signature on a new disk that you will put into a laptop and then put a prior image onto.

The proper procedure using Ghost would be to boot into ghost (I use the usb2 or Firewire (depends on which hard drive box I am accessing; I have both types) floppy from Norton Ghost 2003. A self booting CD made with that program would also work however you probably will have to deal with an error message at boot up (e.g. "Retry, Abort, Fail" -- choose FAIL).

When you take the image, beforehand, be sure to click on "options" and about 3 tabs over you will get the choice for "IMAGE BOOT;" This is the infamous "-ib" switch and you must select it if you want to be able to have the IBM boot manager function working properly. If you screw up with this you could, later, use the IBM MBR repair utility to fix it, so all would not be lost.

Then, select "Disk" to "Image" Make a directory in the drive that will receive the image, then when in that directory, give the ghost image set a name. Then, make the image. Next, if you want to be cautious, after the image is made, select Local->Check->Image File. Do an integrity check on the image file you just made on the drive in the directory in which you put it. I'll assume everything works out to this point.

Then, what you do is just put the new drive into the laptop, you replace the old drive with the new one. The new one can just come right out of the anti static bag in which you received it, you don't need to do ANYTHING to it. On the other hand, if it is a disk you have used elsewhere, you probably don't have to do anything to that either since it will be overwritten entirely by ghost. If the hard disk has a password that you have put on it previously then that could be an issue that I'm not addressing here.

Anyway, with the new drive in the computer, with the enclosure with the image file in it plugged into the computer via USB2 or Fireware cable, and with the Ghost Floppy attached or the Ghost Self booting CD in the drive, reboot the system and this time reverse the process. Select Disk FROM Image. Navigate to the image file in the enclosure that you just created. Click on it. Then, tell the program which disk it is to go onto, e.g. the new disk in your laptop which presumably will be the only choice unless you have TWO potential disks onto which it could go. You obviously need to be careful in such situations to avoid putting the image onto the wrong disk!

It will tell you the details of the image that are going to be put onto the new drive. Hopefully this will include your service partition. Have it proceed. For extra measure, when finished, you could have the program do a "disk integrity" check on the new disk once the image is installed, although generally this is not necessary.

Be prepared that if you have activated software that you may have to go through re-activation if the software detects a change in the system configuration. Examples of this type of software would include but are not limited to Microsoft Office programs and Photoshop.

Good luck.

Ken - thanks again - that's VERY helpful, particularly the -1b parameter.
As a matter of interest, WHY don't I need to worry about the signature, whereas it seems that many other people have had to worry about this? Is it because it's copied as part of the Ghost -1b function?

I've been doing some background reading and have been scared by the horror story of some T43 disk upgrades, for example. Fortunately my T41 disk is only 50% full, so for now I can relax

I'm only planning to upgrade the R40e to 40GB because that's the max supported by the original R40e configuration options, but could I go higher, and if so how high?

TIA

Does this 'signature' thing only apply to T4x?
I replaced the HD in my T23 without any of this sig business.
I plan next to replace my T30 HD. Do I need to worry about it there?

realblackstuff wrote:Does this 'signature' thing only apply to T4x?
I replaced the HD in my T23 without any of this sig business.
I plan next to replace my T30 HD. Do I need to worry about it there?

The disk signature stuff is OS (operating system) related. I don't recall having to deal with this when I used Win2K but then that was a while ago and I may have forgotten. I had little experience with Win9x as I found its iterations to be buggy and crash prone and went more or less directly from DOS to Windows NT4.

It is not something I'd give much thought to in any event. It would come up if you put a 2nd hard drive into a system, either in an Ultrabay or in a freestanding hard drive box, and all you have to do is realize it is the reason why your hard drive may not be visible to the operating system when you would expect it to show up. It is a tiny extra step in the process, which includes formatting, in order to use a new hard drive under Windows XP.

simonbrew wrote:Ken - thanks again - that's VERY helpful, particularly the -1b parameter.

TIA

The disk signature thing is a Windows XP operating system thing, it is not a Thinkpad thing. You would face this issue were you to put an extra new drive in a desktop computer as well.

The horror stories on T43 hard disk upgrades are overblown. I may limit your choice of off the shelf hard drive upgrades, but since the currently fastest hard drive (7K100 Hitachi) is pretty easy to hack, and only costs $121 delivered from Newegg in its largest version, it is not exactly an insurmountable problem to have to deal with.

I don't know what the largest hard disk is that you can put in an R40e, however I'd bet it is a whole lot larger than 40gb.

can you do a straight ghost by putting the drives in a different unit? If so could you change the drive like this?

edrich wrote:can you do a straight ghost by putting the drives in a different unit? If so could you change the drive like this?

You can use ghost to directly clone a drive without making a ghost backup. I've only done this a couple of times and one of those times the cloned drive didn't work. This may well have been due to operator error.

Some say that the drive being cloned must be cloned in a thinkpad, that other machines may count the platters or the cylinders or god knows what incorrectly.

I have no knowledge of this one way or the other, although I have cloned drives outside of their own system on a number of occasions and it has always worked for me, including cloning desktop drives through thinkpads and vice-versa.

I tried it but didn't change the ib setting and it didn't work.. I hope it was the ib settitng, I will let you know in a little while, thanks for the insight of the ib setting

Ken's detailed explanation in this thread is amazing. This definitely needs to be made a sticky. Great job, ken!

Your right about Ken, I thought it was very helpful.

well I got "a disk read error occurred" .. this was a straight ghost with no image.. ib turned on in the forth tab (Image/tape) next I tried id turned on..taking much longer... I hope that means it's working !

edrich wrote:Your right about Ken, I thought it was very helpful.

well I got "a disk read error occurred" .. this was a straight ghost with no image.. ib turned on in the forth tab (Image/tape) next I tried id turned on..taking much longer... I hope that means it's working !

Most days I can't get any respect, not even from my Airedale Terrier, so keep pumping up my ego, guys

I've had occasional failures when making ghost images, but only one time has a ghost image I've made and verified failed to restore my system(s). If it doesn't work the first time, try again. No matter what backup or imaging method you use, it is ALWAYS a good idea to make sequential full disk backups and to keep at least the last 2, preferably more. Hard disks are so cheap nowadays that buying a 3.5" hard drive specifically for storing images on it is easily justified. You can either put it into an enclosure, buy an IDE->USB2 adapter, or just buy a freestanding USB2 hard drive as these are cheap nowadays as well. Following this strategy will make your system as bulletproof as possible. I was hit by the PC Doctor snafu myself and although it was a pain, I was able to recussitate my effected system (former T42) with a Ghost 2003 backup.

The biggest problem with Ghost 2003 is that it has limited driver support for USB devices and hubs and stuff like that and often has trouble completing the dos bootup process. It generally will help in such instances to unplug any unnecessary devices, and especially with a Thinkpad, to remove it from any ultrabases or docks it might be on as the hubs contained therein are usually incompatible.

People who are much better than me with dos drivers and config.sys and autoexec.bat files can probably get around these problems by finding necessary drivers and rewriting the autoexec.bat/config.sys files. I've never bothered with that myself, but it is a viable option for anyone doing drive imaging frequently, such as someone employed in IT.

well back to the drawing board for me... since the id mode didn't seem to do the job maybe there is something else...