Thinkpads Forum

I've run out of space on the hard drive on my Thinkpad T61 and want to replace the 160 MB drive with one in the 500 mB to 1 tB range.

Reliability is of primary concern, price a close second.
My machine is a dual-boot with Windows XP on the first partition and UBUNTU on the 2nd.
Another big concern is need to transfer (clone) the windows partition (first partition) to the new drive with minimal fuss.

I'm confused about what happens if I transfer the windows partition with it's current sector size to a drive with a larger sector size.

Any suggestions as to disk drive manufacturers and models of reliable drives and suggestions regarding the Windows operating system transfer would be appreciated.

There are tools to transfer Windows, some available in Hirens Boot CD. Use a desktop computer or the notebook + USB enclosure so you can connect both drives at the same time

Maybe those tools can transfer Ubuntu too, if no, most Linux systems can be transferred manually by creating the partitions, copying over the files, correcting a couple settings files and installing the boot loader (syslinux or grub) to the MBR on the new drive - This can be done from the install cd

And one more concern - Thinkpads have Hard Drive Active Protection System - There is a motion detector in the computer, when it thinks that it is falling it locks the head of the drive to protect it from head crash. From some googling around, looks like many drives dont support this (they ignore the command to "lock immediately" issued by the protection system) and remain unprotected

Ash, I appreciate your comments.

I'm not too concerned with installing LINUX .... it's the windows partition I'm concerned about. Again, in particular, what happens (e.g. with dd) when transferring from the old disk with a smaller sector size to a newer one which has a larger sector size.

Could you name the specific drives you found that have the "lock immediately" feature? If not, could you tell me the specifics of what you entered in your GOOGLE search?

Thanks ..... jim

Dont do that with dd, there are specialised disk cloning programs that do take care of sectors and all. A few of them are present in Hirens Boot CD, and there is ntfsclone that works from Linux

As im shopping for second hand i can just include "Thinkpad", "IBM", "FRU" etc in the search terms, but its probably not applicable for brand new drives

Another way which gives more results is to search the exact drive model (pretty long string) together with "Lenovo" or "IBM" and see if this drive model is mentioned as a Lenovo replacement part. But i am unsure how safe this way is - It is possible that the same model drives exist with 2 fimware versions, one supporting the feature and one not

I opened a similar question myself a while ago and did not get satisfactory answers yet