Thinkpads Forum

I am upgrading my 20gb T23 hdd to a slightly used faster series 40gb hard drive. I'd like to just clone my 20gb to the 40gb rather than invest hours reinstalling my system and setup manually.

I have Norton Ghost 2003 and I looked over the capabilities of HDClone and other programs like it. My question.

Is there a way to image a hard drive with a CD RW or external USB hard drive? The 40GB drive is set up to go where my original hdrive is. So, I want to work with one drive at a time. The new version of
HDCLONE supports USB devices. Can I have HDClone image to
an external hard drive and then copy the image onto the 40GB drive?

Bruised

So, in essence, what you want to do is two clone/copy/image tasks using a external drive as a temporary storage medium? Copy original 20GB drive onto external media, take the 20GB out, put the 40GB in and dump the data from the external media onto it.

If so, that's probably possible using any one of those programs as long as they support USB transfers. Which brings up the next point... Since the T23 has native support for USB 1.1 the data transfer could take some time. If this is the only time you are going to clone your drive then it doesn't really matter in the long run. If you are considering using this procedure later on to perform backup operations, then you may want a faster solution. Either a PCMCIA-USB 2.0 adapter card or an Ultrabay hard drive adapter.

You can download a free evaluation copy of Acronis TrueImage 10 that will work for fifteen days, that will permit you to do what you want using your CDs.

Using CDs you would not so much clone as backup and restore. To clone you'll need two hard drives attached at the same time. True Image 10 can also do that.

I've used both Acronis 8 as well as 9 to clone several time in the last year and it's been trouble free each time. When you are using an older (USB 1.1) machine, there are some issues to watch out for, such as: if you use a PC Card USB 2.0 interface, it may not give enough voltage to run the external drive. Another option which can be as cheap is to pick up an Ultrabay2000 HDD adapter and put the new drive in that. It makes a quick and painless clone. You just shutdown afterward and swap the drives out.

As Ray said, cloning a drive over USB on the T23 is BRUTAL! It only takes 10 minutes when it's in the ultrabay, but at least 90 minutes over USB.