Thinkpads Forum

I want to upgrade my T60's 60gb hard disk to 250gb. Is it possible to do this as a straight forward clone using ghost or acronis? I've done this successfully on desktop PCs with "old school" IDE drives, but want to make sure the mirror programs can handle SATA, built in security and hidden partitions before I plunk down my money on the drive.

as far as i know it shouldn't matter. The software doesn't see the drive per say, that's handles by Windows and as long as Windows see's it Acronis should do just fine. I upgraded from a 80GB to a 120GB (testing) and i cloned the drive and it worked fine. It only asked about the currentl partitions if it should keep the ratios intact or create new partitions.

I just did that - from 60Gb to 200Gb with Acronis. A marvelously painless experience for me! I put the 200Gb drive in the UltraBay, did the clone overnight, Turned it off in the morning, swapped drives, turned it on and everything was perfect (I mean everything!). T60p 2Gb RAM / 15" Flexview / Fire GL 5250 / Duo Core T7200 2GHz / Fingerprint / ABG Wireless / CD Burner / WinXP

sounds really tempting to do

i'm interested in doing this from my 80gb (whatever lenovo gave me HD) to a larger one. i'm not sure if i should get a really large 7200k drive since it's still pricey OR go for more disk space that's only 5400k

do you need to format the larger, newer drive before you transfer it over with acronis?

FWIW, our forum FAQ has a guide on it. Here it is.

Thanks, that's just what I was looking for.

Now for the mechanics of it: Any opinions of going with a USB enclosure vs. ultrabay?

ryengineer wrote:FWIW, our forum FAQ has a guide on it. Here it is.

DavidR wrote:I just did that - from 60Gb to 200Gb with Acronis. A marvelously painless experience for me! I put the 200Gb drive in the UltraBay, did the clone overnight, Turned it off in the morning, swapped drives, turned it on and everything was perfect (I mean everything!). T60p 2Gb RAM / 15" Flexview / Fire GL 5250 / Duo Core T7200 2GHz / Fingerprint / ABG Wireless / CD Burner / WinXP

Hey DavidR,
How did you run Acronis if your second drive was in the UltraBay? I'm used to running it from a CD.
thanks,
DenTP4rm

DenTP4rm wrote:How did you run Acronis if your second drive was in the UltraBay?

You install it on the boot disk. Most Acronis TI operations will run off the boot disk, with a reboot into an Acronis environment for some operations, such a cloning. The CD is really only needed for recovery operations when a bootable disk has failed.

Cheers,

Bill B.

bill bolton wrote:You install it on the boot disk.

So you run it from within Windows? I knew that was possible but I ran into a glitch or two the first times I tried that and just began running it from the CD ever since.
thanks,
DenTP4rm

DenTP4rm wrote:So you run it from within Windows?

Yes, Acronis True Image 10 executes reliably under both XP and Vista. The current release version is 10.0, build 4,942.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Another question: Does anybody here have experience with the larger Western Digital Scorpio drives? I found the 160gb for $95 and 250gb for $190, and though it's a 5400 rpm drive one of these should give me the elbow room I need for some time to come.

SteveGT wrote:Another question: Does anybody here have experience with the larger Western Digital Scorpio drives? I found the 160gb for $95 and 250gb for $190, and though it's a 5400 rpm drive one of these should give me the elbow room I need for some time to come.

With the media prices getting so cheap progressively nowadays why not go with the 1/2 TB drives and leave room for the camel too?

SteveGT wrote:Thanks, that's just what I was looking for.

Now for the mechanics of it: Any opinions of going with a USB enclosure vs. ultrabay?

ryengineer wrote:FWIW, our forum FAQ has a guide on it. Here it is.

I used the UltraBay - found one for $40 figured it would be a good investment. Now I use it with my old one for backup.

Can I use Acronis to dump the clone into an extrernal USB drive first, then install a new hard drive into the thinkpad and then use the boot CD to move the clone from the USM drive to the new thinkpad drive?

thinktank wrote:Can I use Acronis to dump the clone into an extrernal USB drive first, then install a new hard drive into the thinkpad and then use the boot CD to move the clone from the USM drive to the new thinkpad drive?

Apparently cloning to an external USB drive can have unpredictable results. You might do well to read the following post by Paul Pavlik:
Cloning T60 With Apricorn (Update)

Also check out:
Attaching HD to T60p thru extension cable *PIC*

I have a question for DavidR. In cloning to the drive in your ultrabay with Acronis, did you first have to format the drive in Windows or did you just put the new untouched drive in the ultrabay and did the clone? You said it was done overnight. Do you know how long it actually would take?
thanks
DenTPr4m

I put the 200Gb 7200 RPM drive in the Ultrabay. I don't think the computer recognized it since it was raw. I may have used MyComputer/manage to format it, I'm not sure. I downloaded the Acronis demo, installed it on my internal drive. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I did nothing more than tell it to make a clone and accept all defaults. In any case I did very little but "push here dummy". When it was going about 10 minutes I went to bed. I don't have a clue how long it took. In the AM it wanted to be turned off, so I did. I put the new drive inside, replaced the UltraBay adapter with the DVD/CD and turned it on. Up came Windows with everything intact. I swiped my finger on the reader and started computing. The only thing I had to do was to re-register MathCAD. AutoCAD, WinXP, Office, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, everything worked. All passwords, etc.

time is determined by the amount of data you have. That said, i upgraded my 80GB drive with about 60GB of stuff on it to a 120GB via a Nexxtech USB 2.0 drive and it went nicely. I set acronis the expand partitions since my newer drive was bigger and to keep the old drive data intact. They have the option to wipe it in such cases you're gonna sell the drive or give it to someone else.

The process took maybe 30mins, i'm not sure exactly but it rebooted and came up to a 1/2 booted mode where it took over and started copying all the files over, the first partition, smaller windows partition was done in i'd say 10mins then the other took longer because all my movies and downloads where there.

Thanks DavidR and SHoTTa35. Very helpful feedback. If anybody else comes across this and knows whether or not a new drive needs to be formatted before cloning with Acronis let me know. I've done it in the past but at the moment can't remember whether I needed to do that first or not.

Just one more question for DavidR. Did I understand you had to re-register WinXP among other things? When I have cloned before and put the drive in the same computer I cloned from I didn't have to re-register XP, even when going from a a smaller to a larger drive. All I had to do was let it reboot to recognize the new HD and I was good to go.