Thinkpads Forum

Just cloned my main drive to a new one but it refuses to boot. Old drive is WD Scorpio SE (the precursor to the new Black drive line) 5400 RPM 320GB Sata 3.0, 8 mb cache -- New drive is WD Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM Sata 3.0, 16 mb cache. I believe the old SE drive has the exact same model no.

New drive passes every test i've thrown at it. Drive Image, Partition Magic, Partition Commander, Testdisk, Troubleshooter, Microscope and their own (WDC) diagnostics all show drive is AOK. I've got it setup to dual boot Win98 DOS (for Utilities) and XP Pro. And i can't boot either one no matter which partition i make active. I am smelling a BIOS compatibility issue with this drive. I can access the partitions even in Win98 DOS + NTFSDOS (or without NTFSDOS in the main Fat partition where i have the DOS utilities) using Live cd/dvds to boot.

Drive reads perfectly when using any of my live cds/dvds like Winternals etc... No problems reading and writing while using the live disks. It just will not boot. I've played with the startup sequence and nothing works. Setting controller to Compatible or ACHI makes no difference.

It just gets to looking like it's going to boot but then all i get is the blinking cursor on the top left of the screen and the HDD light goes bananas. Same thing happens when trying to boot from the UltraBay. I haven't see this but heard of some of the WD Blue drives giving older systems problems booting. My old Northwood/Socket 478 systems don't have any problems booting the newer Black Sata drives so far. My 14.1" T61 BIOS is 207. Everything else (except a battery that shows "good" in the mgr but doesn't last even 4 minutes fully charged ) is perfect so i'd hate to flash it unless it is a known incompatibility or problem. I plan to find out about this battery, but i know that isn't causing this problem because after i replace the old drive it works fine.

Can anyone confirm any known incompatibility?

Fortunately reinstalled old hdd with no problems er, except that defective battery.

Thanks for any help/ideas/suggestions on this mystery/problem...

Folks are not too happy with the Scorpio Black, it vibrates, chirps/clicks/clunks, etc.
Apparently the size is slightly over that of normal 2.5" HDs, so you may need to remove the HD-caddy.
If still under warranty, get an RMA, send it back and get a Hitachi or Samsung.

It is usually better to install the new, target, drive in the ThinkPad before cloning. This failure to boot problem is often caused by cloning to an external drive and then moving that drive into the ThinkPad. It doesn't alway fail, but often does.

Neil wrote:It is usually better to install the new, target, drive in the ThinkPad before cloning. This failure to boot problem is often caused by cloning to an external drive and then moving that drive into the ThinkPad. It doesn't alway fail, but often does.

I can second that. Clone with the new blank drive installed, old drive in external case, boot from CD, and you may have better luck. If you already have tried that, it may be a bad drive. I can also attest that the Scorpio Black has vibration issues. Mine was retired to external backup status, it shook my X60T too much.

I'm not an expert with Acronis(started using it recently upon advice on this board; works great, once the 'little things' are figured out), but if memory serves me, there's an option to tick that's easily overlooked when selecting restore settings that hosed me up similar to you. Don't have it in front of me to detail, but once I figured that out, no problems after that, with either restores or clones. So, if you used Acronis, you might wanna investigate further.

I've never had an issue putting the cloned drive in the ultrabay slot or running it externally via USB - just a matter of whether the drive can be seen or not. So, I can't address that aspect of your situation.

I keep an image of an old bootable DOS partition around(actually, Win98), and one of the uses is to test a drive to make sure it can be made bootable. Restore image, boot, bang - eliminates bios, bad drive, etc. and focuses me on the real issue, which is likely how the wanna be cloned image is not being correctly laid down on the drive.

Good luck; sometimes you're 30 minutes away from success, sometimes 3 days; hard to tell when you're at this point.

I believe Neil and mpcook are on the right track. I just cloned successfully a Samsung drive to a WD blue drive that I received under warranty using Clonezilla (original drive only lasted about a year).

If you put the target drive in the main hard drive slot without the caddy, make sure you get the pins of the connector lined up properly. On my T-42, I hold the laptop upside down while pushing the drive into the slot. One time it happened to me that the pins were one row off and the drive wouldn't boot.

Aloha Everyone and thank you very much for your responses... In all the years i've been doing IT stuff i realised i'd never cloned a laptop drive. Katrina had 'taken' our new and only laptop and it took this long to be able to get this TPad. Never cloned for a client/customer. I've recovered tons of data for them but never cloned. Here's what i did:

After trying just about every partition/image/copy/backup/restore app we had, i finally got Acronis True Image to work. Amazing product i've never tried before since i couldn't stand their Disk Director offering. Didn't remember we picked that up on a recommendation and forgot about it. Ghost refused to work - got to the very end with the not enough space...blah blah and to run it with the -NTEXACT switch error- HA! What a joke. Still never worked. Drive Image kept messing up the partition tables (strangely now that they are fixed it works flawlessly to image and restore certain partitions individually -- it's what i've been using for years now). But now i am a True fan of True Image. I did forget to unhide the partitions afterwards, but that was minor. It Truly (pun intended) is an amazing program. I've been doing this for a lot of years with desktop/server drives and i never saw an instance where it didn't switch around the drive letters (for multiple separate partitions) in windows after you first boot cloned drive. I always need to sort them out before things work right. True Image didn't do this?!!!!!!! Perhaps this was just a fluke?

I could have sworn i tried True Image with new drive (to be cloned) in the UltraBay. It's strange that it wouldn't work until we switched them as you suggested.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR WONDERFUL HELP!!!!

BTW, don't experience any vibrations and drive is pretty quiet and cool. ALMOST as quiet as the old one. We'll keep it in there and see how it goes, especially after having to work so hard to get it right

well, coming from a Ghost user, we had to use the -IB switch with making a ghost image of our Lenovo laptops. If we didn't, then when we went to ghost that image out, the destination drive/laptop would stop with a cursor in the top left corner of the screen and just stay there. I don't think you were using Ghost as it wasn't mentioned.

As found on a Symantec Ghost site, the -IB switch does this exactly

"When creating an image or copying disk to disk, the -IB switch (Image Boot) forces a copy of the entire boot track; not just the boot sector"

I can't remember which Thinkpad model we needed to start using this switch, but it started with at least the T43 model. Your mileage may vary of course.

Anyway, maybe your cloning software has a similar switch?

Glad to hear you got it working. I have been using Acronis True Image as well, it has worked every time (as long as I did it correctly!)

Easy Wind wrote:well, coming from a Ghost user, we had to use the -IB switch with making a ghost image of our Lenovo laptops. If we didn't, then when we went to ghost that image out, the destination drive/laptop would stop with a cursor in the top left corner of the screen and just stay there. I don't think you were using Ghost as it wasn't mentioned.

Yes, that is exactly what happened but as i recall Ghost never finished the job and just ended in error. So it's just some weird thing whereby you must put clean target drive internally and then use source drive in UltraBay. Thanks - I've never needed to use that switch with Ghost. I'll remember it in the future.

However, i started getting some really nasty "Right click on drive" crashes/lockups in win explorer when trying to do chkdsk on the drives/partitions. So i restored latest image from old drive via Drive Image and so far no more of that. Nasty stuff that. Forces you to hard power off/reset. Of course in typical windows fashion there's never a log entry on what happened and no blue screen to gain any info from. I will keep monitoring it. I remember junk like that happening with W9x systems when you'd right click on a CD/DVD drive sometimes. Exact same thing.

What surprises me is that i do find the new drive noticeably faster. I didn't think i would.

Same here, too. I've used a variety of backup/restore programs, but tried Acronis per + comments on this board. Best backup/restore program I've run into. I do nothing fancy, just full backups, but it's wayyy fast, pretty easy to use, and the restores work fast/well, too. Reallllly works fast when backing up SSD drives

Be aware, per comments on this board, that for restores, you may want to use the bootable CD/DVD vs. the Windows version. The boot version is what I use for restores(I back up under the Windows; no problem there)and so far, it's worked very well. There is that one little option I mentioned in a post above(forgot which one, but easy to see/find if you're looking for it) that you might wanna keep track of.

AMATX wrote:Be aware, per comments on this board, that for restores, you may want to use the bootable CD/DVD vs. the Windows version. The boot version is what I use for restores(I back up under the Windows; no problem there)and so far, it's worked very well. There is that one little option I mentioned in a post above(forgot which one, but easy to see/find if you're looking for it) that you might wanna keep track of.

Aloha AMATX! Yes, i use the bootable one but i'm not sure what option you refer to. Guess i'll get another chance to find out since i'm not really sure this one actually took the way i thought it did. It has problems going into standby unless this is an issue with this drive. Never had an issue going INTO standby with the other drive at all. But about every 50 times or so it would have a issue coming OUT of standby. This new drive will just sit there with the message: Preparing to enter standby ... not verbatim but something like that. Then it just sits there in the GUI until i power down.

Man this is becoming like a never ending troubleshooting session. Maybe that's what i get when i only pay $40 some bucks for this new drive... maybe that's why it was so inexpensive...?

EAkamai wrote:
...

Man this is becoming like a never ending troubleshooting session. Maybe that's what i get when i only pay $40 some bucks for this new drive... maybe that's why it was so inexpensive...?

Often boils down to time vs. $$$, my man...

The option I referred to when using the bootable CD/DVD is 'Recover disk signature', which is used when recovering the MBR(Master Boot Record). Easy to miss.