X31: Recovery from HPA broken after move to new hard disk

[fschreiber]

Hi,

I am currently trying to replace the original 40 GB hard disk of my Thinkpad X31 with a bigger one. Therefore I bought a 120 GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K120 (Model HTS541212H9AT00).

I moved the HPA to the new drive as described in the IBM document ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/ac ... a_aibm.pdf using the tools FWBACKUP.EXE and FWRESTOR.EXE. Everything worked fine, the HPA is on the new drive and when I press the blue AccessIBM button I enter the Predesktop Area as it was before.

However, when I try to do a system recovery from the Predesktop Area it does not work. The process starts as it should, the recovery tool creates a partition and copies over all files from the HPA and unpacks them. Then a reboot is requested and when I do so it hangs. The system does not boot any more.

When I start from a DOS boot disk I see the partition that the recovery process created with the installation files but that partition does not boot. And yes, it is marked as active in the partition table.

Has any body else experienced this problem or has an idea how to solve this? The HPA seems to be fine but for some reason an unbootable partition is left in the installation process. Strange thing.

Hoping for some hints,
Frank

[losmeme]

It is just a suggestion, but set the hard drive to be the default boot device in the bios settings.

I just replaced the HDD in my X31, and I seem to remember that happening to me as well.

[fschreiber]

Hi losmeme,

your suggestion worked. Thanks a lot, you saved my day.

I removed all entries from the list of bootable devices in the bios except for the hard disk. Recovery went without problems then.

I had USB Floppy and USB CD in the list before and somehow recovery does not seem to like this even if such devices are not connected.

Thanks again,
Frank

[losmeme]

TOR! Great that it worked. I had the exact same thing happen, my external drives were not connected either.

I love my X31!

[boon]

I'm trying to transfer the HPA too as well by doing the steps in hpa_aibm but I have problems restoring it. After typing
FWrestor file=(filename) on my new hard drive, the files are beging restored but when it is done it says error, checksum on file (filename).003 failed, aborting.

edit: never mind, got it fixed, I had a partition in the hard drive which cause the problem.