replacing drive

[jozien]

I have a ThinkPad T60 and would like to replace the
drive with a new 500Gig drive.
What is the best way to do this?
I have the 6 cd disks to restore the laptop to factory condition.
Using these disks, will that initialize the new drive?
I also cloned the old c:\ partition with Acronis.
After I restore to factory condition,
Would it be better to delete XP and restore the old c:\ drive to the
new drive because I have many programs on it, wouldn't have
to re-install.them and would that initialize the new drive?

jozien

[Neil]

Welcome to the forum!

If it was me, there is no question, I would restore from the Acronis image.

Using the recovery disks is going to take a while (much longer than the ATI restore), and you will end up with a system that needs a lot of updates, both from Lenovo and from Microsoft. Not to memtion all the apps that will have to be re-installed.

Once you restore the image, the new drive will boot just like the old one. In fact, it will have the same capacity as the old drive, so you will want to use a disk partitioning app to either resize the new partition, or leave as is and add a second partition to utilize the rest of the new drive as a separate partition from the boot partition. Hope that makes a little sense.

[BillP]

I bought a WD Scorpio Black 500 GB drive to replace the old 100 GB drive in my T60. The 500 GB drive was placed in the T60, the 100 GB in an external USB enclosure, and the T60 was booted with a WD Acronis CD. I cloned the 100 GB drive and Acronis offered to allocate the whole 500 GB in one partition which I accepted. The operating system is Windows XP and the 500 GB drive is advanced format. Acronis automatically aligned the drive for best efficiency with XP and the whole operation was seamless.

[jozien]

I have Acronis and will use as suggested.
I have a backup on a smaller 160Gig drive.
Will Acronis initialize the new drive and will it also
transfer the MBR?

jozien

[RealBlackStuff]

yes