Thinkpads Forum

OK, bear with me here.

I've had IBMs since the 90s. I've had at least 6 desktops (ThinkCentres) and more ThinkPads. I've been able to clone the hard drives on all of them. My newest machine is an M58e. P-4, dual processor, 160 Gig HD, 2 Gig of RAM. The ONLY difference in this machine and all the others is that the HD and optical drive are SATA. On all the others, IDE drives, I used the Seagate Disk Wizard (Acronis) to clone the drives. On this machine, using an external USB2/SATA enclosure, the program runs, tells me I need to reboot, reboots, and stops at a blank screen. Freezes. Nothing. I have to manually power off, choose Safe Mode, choose "Last known good configuration", to get the machine to work. And the clone process does not work. I have an exact duplicate of the drive, Seagate 160 Gig SATA and an external USB2/SATA enclosure.

I've found that the optical drive is "0" and the HD is "1". I have the boot order as Optical first, then HD.

Any thoughts?

Is there a way to create a bootable CD form that version of Acronis? If yes, try booting from that.

I guess I wasn't clear, sorry.

After the program runs, the machine is supposed to reboot, and then clone the drive to the external case drive. The reboot happens, but the machine freezes.

On all the other machines, I run the program, the machine locks both drives, reboots, clones the drive, then powers off. I can then then either swap drives, or put the cloned drive in storage, which is what I do. But the new machine reboots, but nothing happens after that. Freeze. I have to hard power off, safe mode, etc. to get back to a running machine. And the clone never happens.

Something tells me it's the SATA.

Seagate DiscWizard also enables creation of a bootable diskette or CD-R/W that can back up
and restore a disc/partition on a computer running any PC-based operating system including
Linux®.
Reference - http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf

Might try switching the disk controller from AHCI (SATA) mode to IDE mode.
Could also be an issue with the USB controller of latest Intel chipsets being different from previous chipsets and no longer compatible with older drivers.
Make sure you have the latest version of the software.

Even though I had the boot device, USB/external device, turned off in the BIOS . . . After the required reboot to prepare for cloning, I unplugged the USB drive during the splash screen, then plugged it in before Windows loaded. Voila. Am now on the cloned drive.

Odd.

I'm having the same problem - I can't clone the HD on my new x201 thinkpad. It gets to the point where it reboots and then gets an error at which point it restarts. I'm using Easeus Todo Backup.