Installing New Hard Drive in T41. Clone Procedure?

[NTL1991]

Hello, I have a T41 with a 40GB Hard Drive that contains the IBM OEM Version of XP Pro and the hidden recovery partition. I purchased a WD 250GB hard drive today and I'd like to clone my 40GB (including the recovery partition for 1-touch restore) onto my new drive.

I tried Acronis True Image 8 or 9 and after booting for the first time, I got a message saying Windows could not find a file in the System32 directory. I then tried to Ghost (version 8.) the drive and all I got at boot was a blinking underscore... No HDD activity. Also, when I try to bring up the recovery workspace by pressing the Access IBM button, all I get is a grey box that gives me a few options to change the startup procedure.

I don't have a USB enclosure to clone directly from one drive the the other, but I do have an adapter that converts 3.5" connections (power/IDE) to the single-plug 2.5" connection. Both cloning processes worked without errors.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Nick

[Johan]

Nick:

Not that I don't want to help (I do!), but cloning of various T4x's HDD's has been discussed many, many times here on the forum, and - honestly! - I am entirely confident that you'll find the answer to your question(s), and/or alternative solution(s) to your problems by simple Searching this (the T4x) forum for e.g. "T41 clone"... many, many hits will come up, such as e.g. the thread More comprehensive guide to HDD cloning or T41 HD cloning w/Acronis: no luck, PITA. About Ghost not working, only giving a blinking cursor, try search "ghost blinking cursor" or "ghost -ib", and see what pops up. By the way, you should minimum have Service Pack 2 (if running XP) - as discussed in the thread 320GB PATAdrive? (see this post and onwards).

Good luck with getting your new HDD up and running!

Johan

[richk]

I think you are not going to get it to work the way you want it to. Acronis/Ghost, etc cannot see the HPA. (hidden protected area) There are ways to make it visible, but if you use any of the tools to clone the disk to any disk with different geometry from the original, I think there is no way to get the partition back to where it can ever serve as a recovery partition. Phoenix (the guys who designed the HPA process) have tools and there is an IBM whitepaper that describes a method to move the HPA, but as far as I could tell, they just don't work. I have been able to install from scratch onto a larger disk, then wiping out the main partition by copying from the original disk, but that didn't always work right. Finally, I gave up. If you want to find the writeup, here is a link to the whitepaper.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-46023