Cloned Disk Won't Boot

[mixz1]

I'm working on a friend's T42. I cloned the original 60 gig drive to a 250 gig Western Digital, resizing the partitions to reflect an 8 gig Service Partition and the C:\ Active NTFS partition, using Acronis. Examining the original disk and the cloned disk, they appear to be identical, including boot.ini. Yet the cloned drive will not boot. As an experiment, I formatted the 250 and tried to install a fresh copy of XP. During the building of the install, all files needed were copied to the new 250 gig, so it's not a controller issue. But when the copying phase was done and the machine restarted to continue the install, it would not boot to continue.

I thought a 250 was safe (with the latest BIOS) for a T42. Was I wrong?

[sjthinkpader]

Put the new disk in the HDD slot, old disk in a Ultrabay tray. Boot from the Acronic disk in a USB drive then do the cloning.

I did a T43 this way. The old drive was an almost full 100GB and it took about a day to finish it. The XP service partition can be as small as 4GB.

[mixz1]

Thanks for the reply. He doesn't have an ultrabay. And I know I'm being dumb, but I don't understand what you mean by boot from an Acronis disk. I'm using Acronis True Image Home 2009. I have a couple of USB drive cases and several USB sticks available to me. Can you develop a method using the tools I have? I'm only in the States fro a couple of more days and I'd like to get this done. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

[Brad]

If you create a bootable Acronis disk from your Acronis install you can start your ThinkPad while having your source drive in a USB enclosure and the target drive in the ThinkPads drive bay.

Brad

[mixz1]

Understood. Thank you.