Replaced my hard drive - doesn't boot - please help!

[warlock]

Hi everyone,

I have a T60p which is turning 4 years old this month, so I decided to get it a new hard drive. Specifically, I bought a 500 gig 7200rpm Seagate drive to replace the 100 gig 5400 Hitachi it came with.

I used Ghost to copy and expand the 88 gig main partition to 400 gigs and put the recovery right after that. Now, with that hard drive in, the system will not boot. It just sits at a black screen with a blinking DOS cursor.

I've tried fixmbr, fixboot, rebuilding the partition table, flashing the T60p's bios to the latest, everything I can think of.

Here's the part that throws me. If I use a Hiren's Boot CD and tell it " Boot Hard Drive - Windows XP (NTLDR)" ... it finds Windows and boots just fine. If I connect it to my work desktop, it will find Windows and start booting. It just does not like the Thinkpad.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

vvv That's a little drastic, doncha think? Aren't C2Ds a little old to be running Win7?

[billp117]

Start over with a fresh installation of Windows. This would be a good time to install Windows 7. Let Windows take control by deleting all the partitions, reformat the hard drive, then let Windows install clean. You could also try the let Windows do a repair if you are so inclined.

It sounds like your new hard drive got corrupted with all the things you tried. Good luck.

[ArtShapiro]

I can't offer any help, but will observe this is the precise failure I've achieved on multiple computers (both Thinkpads and desktops, and both XP and 7) when doing a total rebuild out of my Windows Home Server backup machine. As an aside, some rebuilds have worked fine, just as expected.

The last time, on my old, sporadically-used T20, I worked for a couple weeks trying everything I could dig up on the web to get it to boot without the kludge that you've described. A non-bootable floppy also worked to boot up the hard drive. I ultimately gave up and reinstalled XP from scratch, irritated more than usual by being unable to deduce the root cause of the failure.

I'd guess there's a probably-minor problem with the boot sector structure. Why FIXBOOT and FIXMBR fail to work is something I can't discern. But it would sure be nice to know.

BTW, with respect to your sub-question, my T60p runs remarkably well with Windows 7. You don't have to restrict it to XP if you don't choose to do so.

Art

[Harryc]

Erase the new drive. Install it in the Thinkpad. Attach the old drive via USB. Boot up a Ghost CD. Clone from the old drive to the new drive.

[91011]

Having had more Thinkpad cloning failures than I care to admit, here is how I would do what you're trying.

1. Get a bootable Acronis Recovery Manager CD - can be made from any install of Acronis - not hardware specific.
2. With the old drive in the main drive bay, boot with the Acronis disc and make a full backup (a .tib file) of the drive to an external HDD.
3. Replace old drive with the new, boot with Acronis again and do a restore, keeping the partion size the same.
4. If the drive now boots to Windows, go to Disk Management and resize the main partion to fill the disk.

Cloning is also possible but I find the above to be more reliable.
1. Put the new drive (blank) in the main Thinkpad drive bay.
2. Put the old HDD in the Ultrabay or in an external USB case.
3. Boot from the Acronis Recovery CD
4. Clone the old drive to the new keeping the existing partition sizes, then resize in Windows.

Win 7 runs fine on a T60p but then I think it runs OK a T43p.

The Warlocks from SF went on to be a pretty fine band.

Good luck,
John

[AMATX]

Having had more Thinkpad cloning failures than I care to admit, here is how I would do what you're trying.

1. Get a bootable Acronis Recovery Manager CD - can be made from any install of Acronis - not hardware specific.
2. With the old drive in the main drive bay, boot with the Acronis disc and make a full backup (a .tib file) of the drive to an external HDD.
3. Replace old drive with the new, boot with Acronis again and do a restore, keeping the partion size the same.
4. If the drive now boots to Windows, go to Disk Management and resize the main partion to fill the disk.

Cloning is also possible but I find the above to be more reliable.
1. Put the new drive (blank) in the main Thinkpad drive bay.
2. Put the old HDD in the Ultrabay or in an external USB case.
3. Boot from the Acronis Recovery CD
4. Clone the old drive to the new keeping the existing partition sizes, then resize in Windows.

Win 7 runs fine on a T60p but then I think it runs OK a T43p.

The Warlocks from SF went on to be a pretty fine band.

Good luck,
John

+1

Change only one thing or feature at a time. Don't change partition sizes at the same time you're setting up a cloned disk. Too many variables if it craps out. If using Acronis, for restores, use the bootable CD/DVD version, not the one that runs under windows. I've been ok -making- the backup via Acronis under Windows, but for some reason(that I've forgotten), the bootable version is the way to go for restores.

I also think you have some sort of blip in the boot sector area, as Hirem will boot, but Thinkpad won't.

Just did this over the weekend, on a new-to-me Z61p, and it worked great(after I changed the bios to Compability mode ).

[warlock]

I also think you have some sort of blip in the boot sector area, as Hirem will boot, but Thinkpad won't.

I guessed that, but fixmbr and fixboot are supposed to take care of that.

[Phidelio]

Being too lazy to read everything I have this solution which I suspect havent been mentioned.

First of all I _think_ that you probably ghosted a HD which also had the hidden IBM recovery partition on it? If so you will get that exact error which nearly gave me cardiac arrest but which I, 100 tries later, finally solved. Here is what I did:


1. Before I succeeded I used several image softs to get the dang thing to boot. I used Symantec, TrueImage, OO Disk Image and several others. Nothing worked and le grand mystery was the fact that all images behaved exactly the same.

2. I found a freeware (!!!)software from easeus.us (no! I am in no way affiliated with them lol) called Todo Backup. I made a clone with it - didnt work. THEN, I made a new one but before I fiddled a bit with the boot settings* for the image in Todo Backup and Voilá - it worked 100%.

3. I then wrote OO disk image and asked them why I had paid 50 bucks for their soft - if you paid for any of the softs you should do the same


Hope that helps - it should.



* yeah "fiddling" - what kind of explanation is that? I know but I dont remember totally and if you just look around the soft I am sure you can sort it out.

[craigmontHunter]

I used TODO backup for my T61 twice - first to replace the IBM partion off my dad's T61 since I killed it, then again to migrate everything to my new 500gb hdd. It works well, but the image needs to be saved on a local (internal/usb/cd...) to work (no network). I don't know how it will work with the lenovo preload though. Iwould reccomend loading TODO on the origional drive, selecting all availible partitions, saving it to an external drive (don't bother with sector by sector), then put in the new drive, boot off the cd, select your image and let it go. It worked for me multiple times, just make sure that you backup the MBR if given the option.

OR you could use the recovery disks, and restore a thinkvantage backup as opposed to running the factory recovery.

AND windows 7 runs like a dream on C2D - when it was released, C2D was the mainstream, with very few core iX around.

[warlock]

First of all I _think_ that you probably ghosted a HD which also had the hidden IBM recovery partition on it? If so you will get that exact error

What if I nuke the recovery partition?

[Phidelio]

What if I nuke the recovery partition?

Well.. I would have done that because it should work without doing so.

edit: I would "NOT" have done that - sorry

And Warlock. I have a few old images which never worked because of this same problem. Later during the week I will see if I can get them to work with Todo Backup(easeus) and report back.

[warlock]

Cautious optimism - I think it's working!

Went back and ran Ghost with the Disk Image flag, with the new drive in and the old drive external, did not resize the partition, and it booted!

Now running GParted to try to move partitions around - wish me luck!

[Harryc]

... ran Ghost with the Disk Image flag, with the new drive in and the old drive external, did not resize the partition, and it booted!

Hmmm, we could have predicted that . Acronis True Image is so much better than Ghost at this task...

[warlock]

Hmmm, we could have predicted that . Acronis True Image is so much better than Ghost at this task...

Acronis didn't recognize the USB external, i think.

It gave me errors about reading sector 0 on various drives, and then hung enumerating drives "Reading drive 1 of 2 #####-----" or somesuch.

[Harryc]

What version of Acronis did you try to use?

[warlock]

What version of Acronis did you try to use?

I want to say 8.something. Whatever my friend had lying around when I swung by. (Even though I'm an IT professional, I hate working on my own systems alone.)

Meanwhile, (sort-of) as suggested upthread, I've cut about 20 gigs off the end of the new drive and put Windows 7 on. The number of already-existing drivers fills me with joy... the video driver situations is being a real hassle.

[Harryc]

I want to say 8.something. Whatever my friend had lying around when I swung by.

That version is going on (3) years old. The latest version is a vast improvement.

[techweenie]

When dealing with multiple partitions on a drive, it is important to keep track of which one is set to active. The active partition is what the computer sees by default, unless you have an advanced operating system such as 7 that can see whatever it wants. I much prefer to use Paragon Hard Disk Manager over acronis or any other offering.