Thinkpads Forum

I've upgraded many drives in my T20, 30 & 60 but never to one as big as 320Gb (WD 3200BJKT). This is the first time I've ever experienced trouble upgrading my hard drive.

Initially I cloned the orig 100Gb using Acronis True Image onto the new 320Gb drive as one partition. I've used True Image before with no problems and it seemed to work fine this time as well (no errors, looks 'good' via USB, etc.).

Installed the new 320 in the T60 and no joy. TP R&R (i.e. "press blue button") pops up, goes away, then nothing... screen just goes black.

OK, maybe Acronis image was a problem after all. So then I did a normal Rescue & Recovery. Again, everything looks fine via USB, but the same thing is happening, I get the initial TP R&R popup then a black screen. I just won't boot.

Admin tools->computer mgnt->disk mgnt reports all drives & partitions are 'healthy' (including R&R's hidden SERVICEV001 as FAT32 on both drives). Win Sys Info reports both orig & new drive support 48bit LBA. just to make sure I checked and SATA drive do not require master/slave jumpers.

So I came here and searched and there doesn't seem to be any issues wrt drive size limitation for the T60 (I have WinXP sp2).

I mean this is usually a pretty straight forward upgrade but this point I'm kinda at a loss.

Any ideas?

Try cloning with the source drive connected via USB and the target 320gb drive installed in your T60.

Brad

Wouldn't that be essentially the same as doing a full restore (via R&R) from my external USB backup to the new 320Gb drive installed in the T60?

It could very well be the same. I was thinking of Acronis and not R&R which I have never used. I have had nearly 100% success using this method.

Brad

Well, a 100% success rate is hard to argue with. It's worth a try.

I think I'll start from 'square one' by reformatting as well.

Success!

I didn't reformat but as you suggested I cloned the orig source desk connected via USB with the new 320 gig drive in the laptop.

Not sure why it should make any difference (never has before) but it worked. The only other difference from my earlier failed attempts was not to allocate the partitions manually. This time I chose to let Acronis define them 'proportionally'.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I love this forum (and my TP's)!

Cloning T60 With Apricorn (Update) is an older thread but it gives some explanation as to why the "source disk in external enclosure, target in Thinkpad" method works. I read some debate on it. Didn't help much. I just know it works. Although some say they just do it first time around I do all my cloning that way. So far I haven't had a single problem.

This may be totally off the mark, but I suspect that there is an issue when the original drive is 'C', bootable, AND active. I've always thought that as a result the cloned drive would lack "something". Maybe it's not set up as bootable; maybe it didn't get the proper bootloader setup, maybe it's not set up as 'active'. All I know is that doing it the other way around doesn't lead to the same issue.

westsailor wrote:Success![..]Not sure why it should make any difference (never has before) but it worked. The only other difference from my earlier failed attempts was not to allocate the partitions manually. This time I chose to let Acronis define them 'proportionally'. [..]

If you let Acronis to define them "proportionally" - I think you wasted ~8-9GB (more or less) for the recovery partition (~4GB -> ~13GB).

Yep. I noticed that. And I might re-clone the drive and allocate manually to recover those 4 gigs.

Then again, I have memory sticks with 4 times that capacity. Pathetic, isn't it? Here I am treating 4 gigs like nothing when the 1st HD I worked on was a 14" Shugart 4004 with a whopping 4 meg capacity.