Thinkpads Forum

In another Post, I made some asumptions that proved to be wrong regarding the Apricorn Cloning Kit as used with the T60.

I use the Apricorn USB SATA Cloning Kit to produce a clone of my 60gb HD, as my form of Weekly Back-Up.

The first Clone that I produced was Non-Bootable (Just a Blinking Cursor following the BIOS Splash Screen).

I called Apricorn and they said to Disable Security for the Pre-Desktop-Area (in BIOS). This did not help.

I called them again and they said that I would have to:

1. Remove the HD from the T60 and mount it in the USB Cloning Enclosure.
2. Mount the HD to receive the clone in the T60.
3. Boot with the Apricorn CD and Clone, being sure to select the External (USB) drive as the Source Disk and the Internal HD as the Destination Disk.

I did this and The resulting Clone was Bootable. I would go through this "Backward Cloning" proceedure weekly.

Subsequently, I deleted The "Client Security" and "Rescue and Recovery" Programs from the C: Drive.

Then, I tried making a Clone Without switching Drives and was surprised to find that the resulting Clone was Bootable.

I thought that the Program Deletions enabled the "Standard" Cloning proceedure (Drives not Switched) to produce a Bootable Clone.

Additional experimentation with a 3rd Drive revealed the following:

The Program Deletions actually had no effect on the Cloning.

I found that the FIRST Cloning must be done (as Apricorn said) from USB to Internal Drive.

SUBSEQUENT Clonings can be made from the Internal Drive to the USB Drive to produce a Bootable Clone. (See edit below).

Note: In ALL cases the Clone (Bootable or Non-Bootable) included the IBM _Service Partition which is accessable with the ThinkVantage Button during the BIOS Splash Screen.

EDIT 5-4-07, Subsequent cloning experience has revealed that the "Easy" Cloning (From internal to USB) does not reliably produce a bootable clone. I haven't isolated the factors that cause this. However a "Reverse" (USB to Internal) cloning ALWAYS produces a Bootable Clone.

Your post tends to support a position I have taken on this forum previously. That the the destination drive being cloned needs to be in the ThinkPad due to hard disk geometry errors which can occur if done otherwise. I based what I said previously primarily on the following thread - one which makes sense to me.

Hard disk geometry thread

Edited dead link to working archived link.

GomJabbar: Of course, as I learned, Only the First Cloning has to be done with the Source Disk (in my case, the Disk installed in the T60 from the factory) in the USB Case and the Destination Disk (My Backup Clone) mounted in the Laptop.

After that, the (Now Bootable) Destination disk can be mounted in the USB Case for Subsequent Clonings and remain Bootable (Even though it is "Updated" during each cloning).

EDIT 5-4-07, Subsequent cloning experience has revealed that the "Easy" Cloning (From internal to USB) does not reliably produce a bootable clone. I haven't isolated the factors that cause this. However a "Reverse" (USB to Internal) cloning ALWAYS produces a Bootable Clone.

Thanks for a very informative post. This definitely solved the issues I was seeing. When cloning from the internal to an external, and then putting the external into the laptop, I was getting "a disk read error occurred" on boot up. I had two 60 GB hard drives, stock drives for a T60. One of the drives had power on my external SATA USB 2.0 casing, and the other would not power at all. Between the two, there was a very slight difference in model number, but that was it. I took the drive that did power in the external case and rebuilt it in the laptop, and configured it for our company build. I've been able to image successfully now, from external to internal without issue. Thanks for the insight here in this thread.

Craziness. We have several model laptops in our Thinkpad fleet. We have the T42, T43 and T60's throughout. I was able to get the T60 imaged with an external USB drive finally, as noted above, but when I tried imaging a T42 using the same enclosure (Vantec NexStar 3), the laptop will not recognize the drive through Acronis or Bart PE. I tested the external IDE (as opposed to SATA), on an XP machine, and it detected it right away, so I knew the enclosure was good. I then connected my known good working external SATA drive (also Vantec NexStar 3), and Acronis picked it up right away on the very same T42. So I took a T43 I have laying around, connected my IDE enclosure and put the 100 GB drive I'm upgrading to internal, and viola, I'm imaging. Hopefully the T42 will boot from it (still imaging as we speak). Any ideas as to why the inconsistency? One thing to note about this particular enclosure, is that it does have a place for 5V power, however it draws its power from USB. In reading the manual, it indicates that if the drive needs additional power to plug both USB-A connectors into the host computer. It has a Y splitter at the end, so essentially it has two USB connectors for this purpose. Again, no matter which configuration, the T42 would not recognize the drive.

Hi Paul,

I follow your advice but there is an error that it said I have only one drive and this program is designed to work for two or more drives

CatKing: You should contact Apricorn Tech Support. They are very helpfull. Their website has contact information. I suspect that the external USB drive is not being recognized by their software.

http://apricorn.com/contact_tech.php

I used Acronis to clone the hard drive. However, have the source drive as C: and the destination drive external USB, it wouldn't boot. I then read this thread so I inserted the new drive in the T43 as the destination, used the original 60gb drive as a USB external drive and source, and Acronis worked great. No read errors. However, I do get the annoying beep at first, and then the boot continues. The fun of dealing with aged computers. Thanks for the thread!

Your post should be in the T4x Forum.
No more need to complain about the beeps and the Error 2010.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=92115