Thinkpads Forum

I am trying to create a backup of my hard drive. I have a 7200RPM/60GB SATA drive in the R60. I've added a new 80GB SATA drive in a USB enclosure. OS is Windows XP professional. Cloned the R60 drive to the USB drive using first Norton Ghost 8.0 then tried with Acronis 10.0. In both cases the clone went fine but the new drive will not boot. With Norton Ghost all I get is a black screen with a blinking prompt. With Acronis it says "Disk Read Error" Ctrl-Alt-Delete to restart.

I can see all the files on the new drive when it is in the USB enclosure. Ran error checking from USB without errors.

Keeping a clone of the system drive has been a successful backup strategy on an earlier laptop. There is a backup on USB to retrieve files or, if (when) the hard drive fails it can be replaced in minutes.

I've read the suggestions in http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=27721

Anyone have any thoughts?

Did you use the -ib switch for ghost?

SeanM wrote:Did you use the -ib switch for ghost?

No switches. Just clicked through for a disk to disk copy.

I agree making a clone of the primary hard drive can be a life saver. Saved me just the other day in fact when an upgrade of Skype of all things went very bad. The way I do it is by putting the second hard drive in the ultrabay in the IBM second hard drive adapter and using the cloning software that came with the second hard drive adapter. Works great. Never had a problem as long as one remembers to remove the newly cloned hard drive from the ultra bay before rebooting after doing the clone. Once the machine has been rebooted that first time after cloning with only one drive in the system, it is then OK to boot up with both drives in the system.

Thanks for the suggestions. It didn't occur to me to go with the ultrabay instead of a usb enclosure. USB has the advantage of working from other machines I need to interface with. I wonder if the clone would have worked for me that way.

I finally got this to work by using Acronis 10.0 to archive the old drive to another (3rd) USB drive. Then, replaced the old C: with the new drive and used acronis bootable CD to restore from the USB drive. It's annoying to need the extra step as well as a 3rd drive, but I can live with this.

Thanks.