T30 Hard Drive Replacement - A seemingly impossible project

[RhoXS]

I upgraded the hard drives in many computers, including laptops, over the years but nothing has so successfully kicked my butt like the T30. I am trying to replace the 40 Gb 5400 rpm drive with a 80 Gb 7200 rpm drive.

I first tried cloning using Ghost 2003 and then Aconis TI 10. I quickly discovered the existence of the recovery partition precluded cloning. The ostensibly duplicate but larger drive would not boot. The IBM splash screen would appear for a moment and then just a blank screen with a blinking cursor. I tried a number of things to no avail including reducing the size of the recovery partition to its original size and even completing deleting it.

I found I could access the recovery partition from the Acronis TI clone so I bit the bullet and "recovered" the new drive to its factory delivered state. Although this appeared to be successful, when I checked the drive I found a major portion of it was unassigned to a partition. I then used Acronis Disk Director to reassign the unassigned space to the main partition. This caused the drive to no longer boot (blank screen with blinking cursor).

I ordered a recovery disk last night from Lenovo. I am hoping I can build a new system on the new 80 Gb drive with it. I am skeptical because I would have thought this would have been successful using the built in recovery partition.

Any thoughts to resolve these issues or insight into why they occurred would be welcome.

[agarza]

I think your problem is related to the cylinder boundaries where the boot files are put in order to boot a Operating System.

In my opinion your best bet is to install Windows XP by your own, making a bootable CD with the I386 files located on the original partition (C drive).

Is your T30 still under warranty?

[ronbo613]

I have a spare 40G drive in a USB external enclosure and wanted to make a clone of the hard drive in my T30 so I could use it as a backup. Acronis TI9, which has always done a good job for me in the past, is unable to clone the 2.5" Thinkpad drive to the 3.5" PATA drive in the enclosure. MS Office is installed on the Thinkpad drive, I don't want to lose it, so I was hoping that cloning a backup drive would do that, but no way.
There seems to be a wide range of opinions on how to clone drives, not sure is any is going to fly in my case. I could use the restore discs , of course, but then I lose the Office suite.
By the way, the "Rescue and Recovery Repair Diskette" link in the cloning the hard drive FAQ is no longer working.