Clone/upgrade an X31 Thinkpad hard disk - can anyone help?

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mcrowne · #1 Post by **mcrowne** » Thu May 25, 2006 10:29 am

I have an X31 with a factory installed 40GB XP Pro drive, and a new 80GB drive in a USB case. My objective is to clone the 40GB drive onto the 80GB one, then install the 80GB drive as the C: drive in the laptop itself.

I've tried to clone the drive with two separate pieces of software now - Ghost 10.0 and R-Drive Image 3 - with exactly the same results. The 80GB disk is duplicated, active and can be browsed as an additional drive via USB while booting from the original drive. But put it in the main C: drive slot in the laptop, and the system hangs at boot, just after the BIOS welcome screen with a flashing underline cursor.

Further research on the web has indicated that Thinkpads have a four sector Master Boot Record instead of the usual one.

One recommendation was to boot from an XP CD, and use System Recovery to fix the master boot record. Unfortunately this asks for an admin password, and there is apparently a bug which stops pre-installed machines getting past this point.

I'm currently left with two options at this stage:

1. Try and copy the MBR directly from the old to the new disk, using some tool yet to be identified.

2. Make a bootable CD/DVD with IBM's repairmbr.exe on it, then try and use this to fix the upgrade disk MBR

Any help/suggestions gratefully welcomed!

Thanks in advance,

Mark
www.mcrowne.com

dc_slim · #2 Post by **dc_slim** » Fri May 26, 2006 6:15 am

Anyone? I'd be interested in hearing about possible fixes myself. I'd like to upgrade to a larger and faster hd pretty soon, but I wondering about the best way to clone my current drive.

dc_slim · #3 Post by **dc_slim** » Fri May 26, 2006 6:26 am

This might be of some help:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/archive/ ... 16950.html

mcrowne · #4 Post by **mcrowne** » Fri May 26, 2006 7:50 am

Bill - thanks for the ideas.

Symantec support told me yesterday that I need to run fdisk /mbr on the cloned disk, having booted from a Windows 98 CD or floppy, to fix this problem. I'll post on whether it works or not.

K0LO · #5 Post by **K0LO** » Fri May 26, 2006 10:58 am

Using fdisk /mbr will probably make the disk bootable into Windows, but in all likelihood you'll lose access to the IBM Predesktop area.

You can later try the IBM repairmbr.exe utility to restore the correct MBR.

dsvochak · #6 Post by **dsvochak** » Fri May 26, 2006 11:29 am

You may want to read this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=19748

Pay particular attention to the posts about things that can go wrong when cloning.

mcrowne · #7 Post by **mcrowne** » Fri May 26, 2006 1:32 pm

Thanks everyone for the ideas.

Booting from an Win 98 CD to a DOS prompt, then running fdisk /MBR did nothing.

As an alternative I created a boot disk from IBM's repairmbr.exe package and booted from that. It declined to have a go at the problem as it is specific to sorting out a particular issue with SAFE GUARD and Restore and Recovery that I don't have.

Through all of this I can still connect the cloned drive in a USB enclosure to the Thinkpad, and browse the apparently complete contects as D: when booted from the original drive.

It's back to Symatec tech support now I guess...

Beyond that, I'm out of ideas now, except for buying a third disk cloning package [Acronis True Image 9.0?] to have a crack where Ghost 10.0 and R-Drive 3.0 have already failed.

Any other ideas?

JHEM · #8 Post by **JHEM** » Fri May 26, 2006 1:43 pm

mcrowne wrote:Beyond that, I'm out of ideas now, except for buying a third disk cloning package [Acronis True Image 9.0?] to have a crack where Ghost 10.0 and R-Drive 3.0 have already failed.

You can download a fully functional copy of Acronis TrueImage from their website.

Put the NEW HD in the machine and the OLD HD in the USB housing. Then clone from D:\ to C:\.

Regards,

James

mcrowne · #9 Post by **mcrowne** » Sat May 27, 2006 10:06 am

James - thanks for this suggestion, which seems promising.

At the moment attempts to install Acronis TrueImage from their web site fail when the program tries to register itself, with the error message "...please try again later".

Fired with enthusiasm by your post, I did look into whether Ghost or R-Drive offered the option of cloning from D: to C: in the way that you describe, but neither seem to.

Regards,

Mark

mcrowne · #10 Post by **mcrowne** » Sun May 28, 2006 1:37 pm

For those who like happy endings, here's mine.

40GB disk was successfully cloned onto an 80GB one by using a third [firewire] hard disk as an intermediate store.

Ghost 10.0 was used to create a full system restore point on the firewire drive from the 40GB drive.

The 80GB drive was then installed into the X31, the system was booted from the Ghost 10.0 CD, and the restore point was copied back onto the 80GB drive with the Restore MBR option selected. The new cloned drive then immediately booted into Win XP.

Shame Symantec Technical Support couldn't suggest this, but there we go.

Thanks again to everyone for their suggestions.

Regards,

Mark

shadowlight · #11 Post by **shadowlight** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 3:14 pm

mcrowne wrote:For those who like happy endings, here's mine.

Just wanna know: Do you still have a working Predesktop Area?

mcrowne · #12 Post by **mcrowne** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 4:16 pm

I doubt it very much - I didn't expect to.

Gee · #13 Post by **Gee** » Sun Jun 25, 2006 2:24 pm

I meant to hit reply and clicked Post New Topic by mistake. Here is the solution

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 353#174353

Clone/upgrade an X31 Thinkpad hard disk - can anyone help?

Clone/upgrade an X31 Thinkpad hard disk - can anyone help?

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