T41 HD upgrade problems

[chazas]

I have a T41 and am trying to upgrade the HD. Yes, I have searched for answers, but am more confused than ever. Has anyone ever successfully cloned a HD on a T41 and been successful in retaining the HPA and all that goes with it? I have scoured the old posts and it's not clear to me that anyone has. I have the original rescue disks from IBM, but I would much prefer not to do a complete fresh install.

Here's what I did.

I downloaded the trial version of Casper XP and installed it on the original 40GB HD. I also went into the bios to disable the HPA so as to make it visible.

I installed the new 160GB HD in the Ultrabay Slim caddy and put it in the T41 then booted up.

I opened Casper, which saw both drives - about 37GB on the original drive, so it seems to have seen everything, including the HPA

I cloned the disk into the new 160GB. I used the setting to keep all the partition sizes the same since the documentation seemed to indicate that the trial version doesn't support re-sizing. (My thought was to mess around with the partition sizes later with Partition Magic.)

I then shut down. I pulled the new HD from the caddy, removed the old HD and installed the new one.

When I tried to boot up, all l I got was the Thinkpad splash screen followed by a blinking cursor. Windows didn't load. Pressing the blue button while the splash screen is on sent me to the bios screen, not the pre-desktop area.

Any suggestions? Would Acronis do better?

[underclocker]

If you have or can borrow a USB floppy drive or CD drive, you can do the following.

I've done it this way MANY times;

1) Ensure the HPA setting in the BIOS is left at normal.

2) Install 160GB drive in the primary drive slot (remove 40GB drive, of course).

3) Use Recovery disks to install the HPA on the new drive. You can let the entire process complete, so that a base XP image winds up on the drive. It should take under 2 hours total.

4) Place the 40GB drive in the carrier and insert in Ultrabay slot.

5) Boot from USB floppy or USB CD and use Ghost or other clone utility to copy 40GB image to 160GB image, you can select entire disk or partition, it shouldn't matter and you should be able to resize. I use Ghost 8.0 for DOS and it doesn't see the HPA this way - even when I select entire disk - so I do not have any issues.

6) Remove 40GB drive and reboot.

[chazas]

OK, here's my new plan. I don't have an external CD drive or HD enclosure, just the two Ultrabay attachments. So I can't use an extra HD at the same time as a CD drive. However, I do have an external USB HD. Think this will work? If so, I wish I hadn't wasted the $$ on the Ultrabay HD caddy:

1. Make sure HPA is set back to "normal" in bios.
2. Uninstall Casper XP.
3. Install Ghost - I have a couple of old versions that I have never really used.
4. Use Ghost to backup my old HD to an external USB HD.
5. Shut down, remove old HD and install new HD.
6. Do a factory install on the new HD with the IBM recovery disks.
7. Change bios to boot from CD.
8. Boot from Ghost CD.
9. Restore the drive image from the external USB HD.

[chazas]

Or maybe this:

1. Make sure HPA is set back to "normal" in bios.
2. Uninstall Casper XP.
3. Install Ghost on old HD.
4. Shut down, remove old HD and install new HD.
6. Do a factory install on the new HD with the IBM recovery disks.
7. Shut down and install old HD in Ultrabay.
8. Change bios to boot from drive in Ultrabay.
9. Boot from old drive in Ultrabay.
10. Use Ghost to copy the old HD in the Ultrabay to the new HD.
11. Shut down and change bios to boot from regular HD.

Or would this procedure write over the HPA on the new drive in step 10?

[underclocker]

I'd try this one;

1) Ensure the HPA setting in the BIOS is left at normal.

2) Install 160GB drive in the primary drive slot (remove 40GB drive, of course).

3) Use Recovery disks to install the HPA on the new drive. You can let the entire process complete, so that a base XP image winds up on the drive. It should take under 2 hours total.

4) Remove 160GB drive and replace with original 40GB drive.

5) Uninstall Casper

6) Install Ghost

7) Full Ghost Image backup to USB HD to third HDD

8 ) Insert 160GB drive in carrier and insert in Ultrabay

9) Ghost restore image from USB HD to 160GB drive

10) Install 160GB drive as primary and boot up!

I'm not that familiar with Ghost for Windows, but if you can Ghost directly from the 40GB to the 160GB (either in the USB carrier or the Ultrabay) in step 7 above, you can save a few steps.

This is similar to your 1:50pm scenario above, either may work.

[chazas]

Better, but still no go.

The product restore CD's worked fine.

I then tried cloning with Ghost 10.0 and it didn't complete the clone. So I uninstalled Ghost (and stupid .NET 1.1) and installed Acronis. Which appeared to work fine. Boots and all normal programs work. But there's no predesktop area when pressing the Access IBM key on boot nor does F11 do anything.

I have always liked this laptop but am about ready to throw it out the window and buy a new one.

Any other ideas?

[chazas]

Next try: Ghost 2003 DOS mode, using -ib switch.

Zeroed out the new HDD using Killdisk.

Installed it in the Ultrabay. Ghost didn't see it, so I went into disk management and initialized it. Was then recognized as D: drive.

Ran Ghost 2003 in interactive DOS mode. Set the -ib switch. When I went to set disk-to-disk copy, the old drive showed a IBM_PRELOAD partition taking up everything except about 3.5 GB, which was shown as "free space." That must be the HPA - uh oh. Ghost wanted by default to eliminate that free space. I tried to retain the HPA by shrinking the size of the copied partition to leave the same size free space. No luck. A nice bootable hard disk - with no HPA, same result as using Acronis.

[chazas]

I suspect that I never properly transferred the HPA to the new HDD with the recovery disks. I went at it again after completely wiping all partitions and zeroing out the drive with Killdisk and this time the recovery disks gave me new prompts, asking whether I wanted to install the HPA. Which I did. This time it definitely worked, showing about 3.5 gb less than the 149 "real" capacity of the 160 gb new drive.

I then promptly screwed everything up (my original drive, mostly) by booting up the computer with both drives attached. I had thought I would save switching the drives around physically by changing the BIOS to boot from the original drive (with Ghost loaded) in the ultrabay and leaving the new HDD in the regular place. Bad idea. The original drive stopped booting at the first Windows splash screen.

My IT administrator at work helped me to try several things to try to recover the original HDD, none of which were effective. So I just rebuilt the new HDD from scratch. With all the time I wasted trying to clone I should have just done that first, I would have saved time.

suspect it would have worked to Ghost from the old drive to the new, at least using Ghost 2003 in DOS mode with the -ib switch, once I had properly prepared the new drive. But we'll never know.

[pksw]

I have successfully been able to clone the HPA, using a USB enclosure for my new HDD.

I have a T41p, with a 60 gig HDD, and the new drive is a 120 gig HDD.

I didn't clone the old system, but could have if desired. Instead I just let the HPA restore a "factory" WinXP on to the hard disk (well almost factory - I managed to change some of the installed programs by interrupting the factory restore process).

The best explanation I found here is at:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=13814


It was a while ago, but what I did was:

1. Set BIOS security level for HPA to "normal"

2. Used a partition program to create a 5 gig FAT32 partition on my 60 gig HDD. (The partition is needed, as NTFS isn't visible under DOS, unless using a third party program)

3. Obtain the dos based tools to copy the HPA to the FAT32 partition (I can email them to you, but also available if you boot off the HPA, and on one of the boot options it ends up at the command prompt, and you can just copy those files to the FAT32 partition

4. Use the dos based tools (fwbackup, fwrestore) and backup the entire HPA to your 5 gig FAT32 partition.

5. Plug in the new 120 gig HDD into the USB enclosure

6. Boot WinXP (off the original 60 gig HDD)

7. Now in WinXP, you will see both HDDs, if not format the 120 gig drive to FAT32. Make sure the drive is bootable, or have a bootable CDROM available. Copy the backup of the HPA to the new drive

8. Shutdown, and install the new drive into the T41p, you won't need the other drive now.

9. Reboot, and boot into DOS from the new drive or a CDROM

10. use FWRESTORE, and it will restore the backup of the HPA on to the new drive

11. Reboot, and boot into the HPA on the new drive

12. Factory restore the new drive - you now have a new copy of WinXP on your system

Optional:

13. During the factory restore, several ZIP files will be extracted to the hard disk. This takes quite some time, but eventually the system will want to reboot. Leave a bootable CDROM in the machine before launching the factory restore, and set the BIOS to boot from the CDROM. WHen you want to factory restore, manually boot off the HDD.

Now have a long coffee break, when the system reboots itself it will boot off your CDROM. go to your C: and there will be a whole lot of directories like INSTALL, DRIVERS etc. If you check them out it's obvious where the programs are stored. I just deleted the subdirectories that contained Norton AV 2004, and the other useless software like Adobe Acrobat Reader 5, DLA, etc etc....

Then reboot off the HDD, and allow the factory restore to install WinXP as usual, this time without all the added useless programs.

I went a step further, and cloned the partition when it was at the state after all the files were unzipped. I could just use those files to reinstall WinXP if required.

---
If you want to clone your HDD rather than factory reinstall WinXP, then I'd recommend using Acronis, and just create a FAT32 partition on the new drive with the backups, plus the backups of the HPA.

After restoring the HPA, you could boot an Acronis CDROM, and then restore your cloned HDD from the FAT32 partition.

After you're done, just delete the partition, and resize everything to one large partition.

Let me know if you need any help.
EDIT -> IBM did provide me with the latest HPA, so when I did this, WinXP with SP2 was installed, rather than the original WinXP SP1 that came with my system. However their version is not a "slipstreamed" WinXP-SP2. It installs the SP2 patch during the installation process. These days I prefer a slipstreamed approach, but that's another topic.