Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

I have a T30 running XP PRO SP2 with a Toshiba MK4019GAX 4200RPM 40Gb hdd as installed when I bought it.

About a month ago the drive started making horrible noises, so I backed_up all my data (by copying it all across to an external HDD and then DVDs).

Now the disk is still functional (with occasional read failures / failure to boot).

I have a replacement disk (an Hitachi 5400RPM 60Gb HTS548060M9AT00) which I would like to image from the original Toshiba to save installing everthing again.

I also have kits to mount the HDDs in another PC.

I do not have a TP recovery CD.

I did some research and come up with a solution that I think should work.

1. boot up the system on the T30 and use sysprep to strip the system ID.
2. remove the drive from the T30 install it and the new drive in the other PC
3. boot up the other PC using a LNX-BBC CD (http://lnx-bbc.com)
4. use DD to clone the whole 40Gb HDD (including the recovery partition) to the new 60Gb HDD. (something like dd bs=8192 if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb)
5. reinstall the new drive into T30 and boot up into the XP
6. use XPs disk management utility to create another partitiojn to recover the other 20Gb

Naysayers please naysay!!!

will this work... or am i barking completely up the wrong tree... as they say.

Any suggestions for a better method?

Cheers

Nick


PS: if all this fails i happen to have a XP Pro CD which i can use to reinstall the system.

It could work, but I personally wouldn't go through the trouble. i'd back up all of my important documents and then do a fresh install of Windows. I'd only take the drive image route if I couldn't afford to do a fresh install. Also, if you do a drive copy, you don't need to use sysprep since that install of XP is only changing hard drives. What causes XP to give a blue screen upon bootup when in a new computer is having a different motherboard with a different chipset.

Hello "Guest"

As far as I know, it should work. I just switched from one 60GB to another 60GB/7200 by copying (via driveimage) all partitions from one to the other. Acronis should do the same.

The only thing You might have to restore is the F11-link at boot (start recovery- link).

This way You should be able to preserve Your installed system & software, Your preinstalled software and Your preinstalled recovery (which came instead of CD).

If You want a fresh and clean system however, You should just copy/image Your recovery and your data-partitions, and after that start a recovery.