upgrade hard drive won't boot on T61p

[ahmahn]

Hi,

I want to swap out the existing 160gb drive with a bigger capability drive. Used Acronis Easy Migrate for the cloning with the new drive plugged via USB from an enclosure.

The clone process seems to go smoothly but when I plug in the new hard drive the system won't boot at all.

I have tried this with both the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500Gb (with jumper block to reduce transfer rate to 1.5) and a WD Scorpion Black 320Gb WD3200BEKT. BIOS does not appear to recognize the new drive and under startup it still shows the old drive model number.

When I plug the cloned drive into a desktop it boots successfully to the XP loading screen.

I have searched forums and all the posts suggest my new drive should work with the T61p so I don't know where I went wrong. Thanks for the help!

[dsvochak]

Migrate Easy seems to be a subset of True Image.

The standard suggestion is to put the old drive in the usb enclosure, the new drive in the machine, boot from the program bootable CD and clone. Reports here are this works better than having the new drive in the usb enclosure.

Also, setting jumpers as described is not usually necessary.

[EOMtp]

It is precisely as dsvochak explained (above). The new drive MUST be in the primary drive bay (or in a non-USB Thinkpad docking station) in order to "receive" the proper Thinkpad disk drive "geometry" during the cloning process.

There are rare and esoteric circumstances where the new drive destined for a Thinkpad may reside in a USB enclosure during cloning, but discussing pathologies which are 3 sigma out from the norm is not helpful here!

Note: it is normal and expected that the drive you produced as you described would boot in a non-Thinkgpad machine but would not boot in a Thinkpad.

[GomJabbar]

What the previous two posters said.

Also, I ran into a problem with using a new drive in my T42 once. I found that if I was not using the hard drive "caddy" (or cover), I needed to hold the ThinkPad bottom side up for the drive to properly plug into the connector. It is possible (at least on the T42) for the drive to plug into the connector one row down from where it should be.