Installing new hard drive nightmare

[andre#4]

I have been trying for about 48 hours to put a new hard drive in my t60p uxga flexview model 2007-93u with XP sp3

My old disk is a hitachi 100GB 7200. My new disk is an Intel 40GB Solid State Disk. I have a USB enclosure. I have been trying to clone the old disk to the new one and also to use the recovery discs. This is getting frustrating. My idea is to have the OS and programs on the SSD and have another large hard disk in the slim bay for storage.

I have tried:

Norton Ghost disk copy, and one time backup,
Acronis true image home 2010 cloning,
and the recovery discs

With Norton, the disc copy and the one time backup both produce a copy or clone that is slightly smaller than the original. I did each partition seperately, and used ntfs for the main partition and fat32 for the recovery partition. Norton claims the cloning operations are successful, but the cloned image is 19GB while the original image was 22GB. Obviously it is not an exact copy if the new copy is smaller. I am not using any compression. I followed the instructions in the how to articles. when I try to boot with the cloned drive, i get a small message that says "remove all discs" or some such. This is with only the cloned drive in the machine and no cd's in the optical drive.

With Acronis, I tried two ways.

1, by leaving the new disc drive unallocated and unpartitioned. The software automatically selects the empty drive as the target if it is unallocated. But when I click the next button, it shows a little sindow that says it it proceeding, but this little window only appears for 1/10 of a second and then dissapears. Nothing else happens. I can press next again, and the little window will come back for another 1/10 second and this can happen as many times as I press next, but it doesn't actually proceed.

2. I tried cloning after creating one partition on the new drive that takes up the whole drive, and also by putting two partitions on the new drive. But in both cases, it simply will not allow me to select my new drive as a target. It is grey and unselectable.

I have tried all of these methods in as many different ways as I can think of and nothing works.

I also tried to use the recovery discs.

I put the new drive in the machine and followed the directions for using the recovery discs, but it never gets anywhere. It says there is nothing to boot, even though I try to boot from the cd #1 rescue and recovery cd.

I also wanted to make new recovery discs and try them, and I will do that if I can but there is no provision for making them. I followed the direction s in the manual, but there is no thinkvantage create recovery discs utility on my computer. I am downloading an updated driver for rescue and recovery and maybe with that I can make the new discs and try them but I have tried so many things I doubt anything will work.

Any help is appreciated

I was wondering if the problem is that the new drive is smaller but I don't see why.

[Harryc]

What is the percentage of used and free space on the 100GB drive? As far as booting a CD, hold down F12 when you see the first boot screen then select the optical drive to boot from. Optionally you can put the optical drive first in boot order in BIOS (startup)

[RealBlackStuff]

Upon boot, press F1 to go into BIOS setup.
Select Startup/Boot and see if there is any entry there that shows the SSD. If so, what does it say?
If not, go back to the start screen.
Select Config/Serial ATA and change AHCI to Compatibility or vice versa, whichever is there now.
Press F10 to save/exit and try again to install.

[AMATX]

Couple thoughts here, as you have several issues occurring concurrently...(better to deal with each issue separately, etc., but I don't know enough about your situation to advise too much):

* Most importantly, ALWAYS make a COMPLETE backup of your production system before you start dinking around...

* I've had better success(when cloning from a larger drive to a smaller drive) shrinking the source drive before trying to do any kind of cloning. So, run some type of partition manager to shrink the various partition(s) on your hard drive to a size(s) that will fit on the new SSD.

* After shrinking the partitions, test to make sure everything works(boot up, accessing data, etc). Then, make backups of each partition.

* Then restore the backed up partitions to the new SSD. If using Acronis, be sure and restore the MBR(Master Boot Record) and checkmark the(easy to miss) tick box about carrying over the 'disk signature'.

* Therefore, technically, you didn't run cloning software. You just did a backup and then restored that backup to a different drive.

* If using Acronis, I've noticed that I can run the backup part of Acronis under Windows fine, but when doing a restore, I boot up my laptop off of the standalong Acronis DVD. Don't remember why, but it works better than trying to restore from running under Windows. Somewhere in Acronis is the option to create a bootable DVD, so look into that. I boot the DVD from an external USB DVD drive, so I don't have to change devices around much on my laptop.

* If you're going to change disk formats(ala, NTFS to/from FAT32, etc.), do this separately. Less complicated that way. Deal with each issue by itself.

Doing the above has worked for me for many, many years, with no problems. I particularly like Acronis, as it's easy to use and very fast. After figuring out a few quirks with the software, it's very reliable.

The above other post about changing AHCI to Compability mode in the bios may help too. Seems I vaguely recall needing to do that to get something to work(bootable DVD, maybe?), but it's been a long time since I made that change, and I don't recall the exact details.

[andre#4]

Thank you very much for all the help and ideas...I don't know how many days I am going to work on this before giving up, but so far I am still trying. I did make a backup of the system drive, but since it doesn't work, I don't know what value it would be if there was a problem. This is a situation where you say: make a backup before trying to make a backup, in case your backup doesn't work. Well, what if the backup doesn't work, why would the other backup work? Since my recovery disks also don't work, I am reluctant to do anything to jeopardize the working OS on the original drive.

In addition to the above suggestions, Now I am going to try making new recovery discs, because my other ones don't work. I am also going to try making a Windows XP recovery disc and installing a new copy of XP on the disk then adding lenovo drivers. I am also going to try to do this with a 320GB 7200rpm Western Digital drive and see if that makes a difference (even though I want a ssd, I want to see if the disk is causing all the problems...my general m.o. is to change one thing each time I try this...the only problem is that there are so many things to change and nothing works.)

I am not having any trouble selecting which drive to boot from. The problem comes when I want the boot to happen. When trying to boot from the recovery disks, instead of booting I get a black screen that says to remove all disks and restart. (how would you restart with no disks)

Acronis seems like a good program, but it just doesn't work for me. My target drive is always in grey letters instead of black, and it is not selectable. (this is when the partitions are made on it already)

When I leave the ssd unallocated, Acronis automatically selects it as the target, so that helps with the above problem of it not being selectable when it is partitioned. However, once I select it here, the little window that says "progressing" only comes up for 1/10 second, and goes away. THe progress does not occur. This seems like a bug in the acronis softeware because if there was something else wrong it would show a window stating that it could not complete the operation.

Why would the ssd drive be unselectable when the partition is already on it? The drive is recongised in disk management.

Another thing about acronis that I dont like is you have so select the entire drive as the source. It wont let me select only one partition. That, along with the fact that it doesn't work anyway, force me to use the norton ghost, which is the only other one I have. ( will try EZGig next).

With norton, it makes a clone that is 19GB from a 22GB source. Obviously it is not doing right. Plus, the clone won't boot.

Thanks again.

[RealBlackStuff]

If you had taken an IMAGE with Acronis, all you would have needed to do was restore that image on the new HD/SSD.

The Recovery disks ONLY work on a blank disk, not on a partitioned one.
So get e.g. active@killdisk from http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm or DBAN from http://www.dban.org/
and wipe the SSD.
Then use those CDs.

[andre#4]

I just saw some light at the end of the tunnel!

I just tried EZ gig 3, with a little wire they sell called a sata usb wire. Instead of enclosing the drive like my other usb hard drive enclosure it just plugs into the end of it. Also, it does not require an ac adapter to power the drive like my enclosure did. With this wire I hooked up a new 320GB WD 7500rpm HDD, and attempted to clone my system drive and my recovery drive to it. The program allowed me to set my own partition sizes, so my recovery partition is the same size as the old one and my system drive takes up the rest, about 300GB.

It actually did the operation. It claims there are errors and the disk should be checked, but still it did do something. Also, I checked out the new drive in Disk Management, and the clone is the exact same size as the original, for both the sustem drive and the recovery partition. THis is better than I could get with norton ghost, which had smaller clones than the originals, and better than Acronis, which wouldn't write an image at all. Of course I havent tried this on the ssd yet but I will. And before that I will see if this new disk will boot the machine and work.

The suggestions are helping me and i appreciate them immensely and thank everyone for their time I know it is long reading.

If you had taken an IMAGE with Acronis, all you would have needed to do was restore that image on the new HD/SSD.

Acronis won't put an image on the ssd. It tries, but does not proceed for more than 1/10 of a second then stops with no explaination.

[quote=The Recovery disks ONLY work on a blank disk, not on a partitioned one.
So get e.g. active@killdisk from http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm or DBAN from http://www.dban.org/
and wipe the SSD.
Then use those CDs.[/quote]

The cd's don't work because the machine won't boot from them. It tells me to remove the discs and start again.

But thank you for the info about the blank disk. Acronis has changed their language on the program. I don't think they use the word image. I think they use the word clone.

[GACrabill]

... It claims there are errors and the disk should be checked, ...

Always run a complete chkdsk on the original drive before attempting a clone or image copy to a new drive.

You really want a perfect result so the original drive better be in perfect condition before the cloning process is started.

[Muse]

The Recovery disks ONLY work on a blank disk, not on a partitioned one.
So get e.g. active@killdisk from http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm or DBAN from http://www.dban.org/.
Then use those CDs.

So, you want to use R&R CDs on a blank disk, single partition, not formatted? Just "unallocated" space? I have a DBAN CD. I'm having problems restoring from a 7 CD R&R set... See:

Use R&R set from one T60 to restore another T60?
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=92168

[Asudef]

Are you trying to clone the stock drive on your T6x? I've been thinking of installing a Momentus XT in here for the extra space while keeping the Recovery partition and ThinkVantage suite, and also to fix a STOP error I keep getting that may be linked to the HDD.

Do you think it is being difficult because you're using a SSD or are they all this difficult?

[RealBlackStuff]

FYI: EZgig3 is a limited version of Acronis TrueImage. It is included with some Apricorn adapters, such as DriveWire, which I use.

[AMATX]

Sounds to me like you're in over your head and may need some in person help. You're having way more problems than would normally occur with a hardware situation. Also sounds like you've never setup cloned drives in the past. While you may end up resolving this, be prepared to take it to the next level.

Most people on this board have been up the creek with a hard drive at some point; that's often how one learns this stuff. Three hours/three days/never away from fixing it; hard to say until you make more progress.

I'm a bit paranoid about backups, having been burned in the past. NO substitute for restoring a drive and being up and running in a few minutes. Doesn't really matter -which- backup process, just that it works and is easy to use...