T43 backup /recovery strategy

[Ed E.]

New guy here. Ok, here’s my new T43 backup/recovery strategy.

First, the background for this new tack is that I had to replace a crashed hard drive from recovery cd’s, which put me back to ‘factory original’ state. I then had to reinstall all the applications that I had accumulated over the last 5 years or so. And then, having an external hard drive backup (luckily), I was able to recover my doc’s and pictures, etc. Not an unusual story for the everyday user that experiences a hd crash. But what a pita! Just lucky I was able to get through it relatively unscathed. Since going through that experience I have been looking around for a better and easier backup/recovery strategy. Having researched these ThinkPad forums, I have come up with the following plan. I would appreciate any comments/suggestions, especially if there are any holes/gotcha’s in this plan.

Backup/recovery strategy for my T43p with 60GB/5400 rpm IDE HDD:

1. Purchase an UltraBay Slim HDD Adapter and compatible replacement HDD. Thanks to the discussion in the 'UltraBay Slim HDD Adapters and USB Converter' thread, especially to members schen and yak, I found the UltraBay Slim HD Adapter on ebay (from china, approx $20 with shipping). BTW, I am still looking for a deal on a 2.5” pata/ide 60GB/5400 rpm or bigger/faster HDD. I paid way to much for one from Lenovo but, at the time, I was in the throes of loss and recovery. Oh well, lesson learned. I might even buy two just to have a spare on hand. I could also put the new HDD in a USB enclosure and go that route but I’m thinking the UltraBay Slim would be faster, right?

2. Purchase Acronis True Image 2009 (probably do the free trial first) and on a regular basis use it to ‘image’ my HDD to the one in the UltraBay Slim Adapter. No particular reason for Acronis vs. Norton other than it seems to be the one I see mentioned more often. I may still occasionally copy my doc’s and pic’s to my other external hd just to be safe and it may be easier to recover a single doc, if need be. Not sure how easy that would be using Acronis.

3. With this strategy, it is my plan that in the event of another hard drive crash, I could simply replace the dead drive with the Acronis ‘imaged’ hard drive from the UltraBay Slim and be off and running. If that ever happened and if my plan works as hoped, I would be one happy camper with a big, proud of myself, satisfied smile.

As I stated earlier, I would appreciate any comments/suggestions, especially if there are any holes in this plan.

And also, as a new member, I feel lucky to have found this forum and would like to thank all contributors, especially in the
backup/recovery arena. I'm sure you will be hearing more from me....

[davidspalding]

I had to do a restoration recently due to damage from a free registry cleaner.

I have my drive partitioned as follows:

• c: 20GB system drive
• l: 5 GB my own documents drive, I don't use "My Documents" (though you can map "My Documents" for a user to any partition with TweakUI; actually I think XP lets you do this by right-clicking on "My Documents:)
• p: 15 GBprogram install drive
• u: 10GB heavy-churn users drive (\documents and settings moved here, and registry edited to change this to the default partition for any user information); can be used for TEMP and TMP variables
• w: 40 GB + remaining space, used for large files and multimedia (music, etc.); you could also point TEMP and TMP here

Now as you can imagine, C: and P: don't need defragging very often, and U: gets fragged and used a lot.

I have Norton Ghost running and making nightly backups to a NAS drive. L: every night, C:, P:, and U: every weekend. When the registry cleaner caused damage, after trying system restore and re-merging the backed up registry, I simply booted with Norton Ghost with the recent C: and :P backups (the registry cleaner borked up a program installation) on a second HDD (coulda used the W: partition with all that free space on it), and restored the entire partitions. Took an hour. Easy.

I think I'll try Acronis as I find the Norton Ghost 9/2003 app very slow in XP. It backs up in the background just fine, though.

[dsvochak]

To make life easy, you should have at least 3 drives:

1) one as the operating drive
2) one to store the drive images (can be anything. I use a desktop drive in a usb enclosure)
3) one to restore to should the operating drive die

While you can store drive images on CD's it takes a long time and a lot of cd's. Given the current price of drives it's a lot easier to buy an extra hard drive.

[jamnkats]

Thanks for this thread. I have been relying on an external HD for backup (Western Digital 250gb) and it recently failed and I've lost a lot of data that I MOVED from the laptop. So I'm looking into this situation also. I got the UltraBay adapter - would http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-SEAGATE-ST98021 ... 1|294%3A50 be a decent HDD for it?

[Ed E.]

Yes, I too, am looking for a hard drive for my T43. I've been reading the thread 'Problems with non-thinkpad option drives on T43 thinkpads', http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... &start=510 , and am seeing lots of concern about BIOS issues causing 2010 boot errors. I gather that you can 'flash' a hard drive to cure this but I'm not sure how that is done. All I know is that my BIOS is version 1.29 so I am trying to find a hard drive to match that so I don't have to mess with 'flashing'. Besides, I got in trouble once for doing that... hehe. Anyone know where I could look for a good T43, BIOS 1.29 specific, hard drive? Thanks.