Safe to disable Predesktop Area for hard drive upgrade?

[edbatista]

I'm using EZ Gig II to clone my nearly full 40GB hard drive to a new 100gb.

The clone seemed to work fine, but when I installed the new drive in the laptop, it wouldn't boot.

Apricorn support told me that I needed to go to BIOS > Security and disable the Pre-Desktop Area.

Is this safe? Any precautions I should take? Thanks--

Ed

[raabjerg]

Totally safe.

AFAIK, the only thing this setting does is to tell the BIOS not to look for the pre-desktop area when booting.

[GomJabbar]

I just did this myself with the same program. Same thing happened to me. I decided to clone the drive a second time. After cloning, when I put the cloned drive in the main hard drive slot, I really made sure that it plugged in properly to the connector. I did not transfer the metal caddy from the original drive to the cloned drive, I only transferred the door.

If you look, you can see it would be possible to insert the drive without the caddy, and have the connector not line up properly, even though the drive went in all the way. What I am saying is, that the top row of pins on the hard drive could end up connecting to the bottom row of pins on the laptop connector. One other point, the new hard drive goes in the ThinkPad in what appears to be an upside down position. The circuit board is facing up, and the metal cover & label facing down. When you remove the original hard drive from the main slot of the computer, look carefully at the pin arrangement, and compare to the new hard drive. Oddly, the hard drive faces down in the Ultrabay Slim adapter, and it faces up in the main hard drive slot of the ThinkPad.

Long story, short. I plugged the drive in after cloning a second time, and it booted up just fine. It would boot in both Windows and the Rescue and Recovery. Whether it was the second cloning, or lining up the connector properly that did the trick, I cannot say for sure. Predesktop Security was set to Normal in both instances - at all times.

[edbatista]

Thanks for the replies.

The old and new drives are made by different manufacturers but appear to be identical externally, and I used the caddy when installing the new drive.

When trying to boot from the new drive, the initial IBM splash screen appeared, suggesting that the new drive was inserted properly, but then I got a black screen with a blinking white cursor in the upper left corner, suggesting that there was another problem.

The guy I talked to at Acronis support immediately said that it was something specific to IBM T-series machines, and that the solution was to disable the Pre-Desktop Area and re-clone the old drive to the new drive.

I just wanted to make sure he wasn't advising me to do something I'd regret later if things went wrong.

Ed

[GomJabbar]

Totally safe.

AFAIK, the only thing this setting does is to tell the BIOS not to look for the pre-desktop area when booting.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

If you select "Secure," the IBM Predesktop Area is hidden from the OS and cannot be changed at all. If you select "Normal," it is hidden from the OS and can be changed. If you select "Disabled," it is visible from the OS and can be reclaimed by the OS.

If you set the security to Disabled, you could possibly write to that area depending on what you are doing. Probably cloning would be safe, but I did not find it necessary to do this.

[christopher_wolf]

The "Secure" feature makes it such that *only* the IBM/ThinkVantage R&R program set can read/write from/to the Predesktop area. It also makes it secure enough to not be seen and written to be all but the most basic lower-level I/O functions.

Setting it to "disabled" will allow you to write to that area and see it in the OS as well as performing read/write ops through any program on it.

[edbatista]

Thanks, all.

It turns out that I didn't have to disable the Pre-Desktop Area in order to successfully clone the drive.

I had originally cloned the drive by booting from the EZ Gig II CD because, according to the Apricorn documentation, this would "enable faster copies and ensure no interruptions."

However, it also appears that this prevented EZ Gig II from seeing some "hidden elements" (I'm sure there's a better technical term, but I don't know it) on the old drive and copying them to the new drive. Even though the new drive had all the visible files from my old drive, without these hidden elements, it wouldn't boot.

But before I started messing around with disabling the Pre-Desktop Area (which would apparently make these hidden elements visible to EZ Gig II so that they could be copied to the new drive), I decided to simply run EZ Gig II from within Windows and repeat the cloning operation.

For some reason, this worked perfectly. No need to mess with the BIOS, no need to disable anything.

[GomJabbar]

It just occurred to me that your Predesktop Area is different on the T41, than mine on the T42, unless you upgraded Rescue and Recovery.

I did my clone booting up EZ-GIG with the floppy disk that came with the Ultrabay Slim Hard Drive adapter. Perhaps I did not run into the same issues as you because our Predesktop Areas are different. AFAIK, this change occurred with the T42. Unless you upgraded Rescue and Recovery, you use the HPA or PARTIES for the Predesktop Area. My T42 uses WinPE or Type 12 Partition for the Predesktop Area.

Some good info on this is available in the IBM document "IBM Rescue and Recovery Deployment GuideVersion 2.0 Updated: April 11, 2005". I would have to search for the link to the file.

Here is some more info on this: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Hidden_Protected_Area

[butron]

I thought it would be useful to summarize the current status. I just cloned a 40G HD from a T42 into a 120G new drive without a hitch. After a lot of research I followed the instructions in the following write up. All you have to do is replace "Ghost" for Ez Gig, and the rest is the same.
[http://www-csl.csres.utexas.edu/users/b ... inkpad.pdf]

This is similar to the new instructions in the Apricorn support site, but I find the intructions here more clear.

[rocky01]

Hard drives are so big in my view it always seemed almost silly not to clone the hidden partition ... except that right now I've been so not-thrilled with Lenovo, compared to when IBM was in charge, that I would try to blow the darn thing out, just on general principal; e.g. the Thinkvantage System Update arriving braindead, neglected and in many cases totally non-functional is just the tip of the iceberg with them. I was considering a T-61 but now I'm starting to look elsewhere. Yeah, I would definitely get rid of it at this point.