Thinkpads Forum

We just bought 2 X60 tablets for the office, and they came with an 80GB, 5400rpm drive. We bought 100GB, 7200rpm drives to replace them, so I used Ghost to do a complete partition copy to the new ones, since the laptops didn't come with the CDs, only the service partition. Now the laptops won't boot off the new hard drives, even though Windows and a boot disc see the new drive, and the main partition is set as active. The boot.ini on both hard drives is the same.

Has anyone else run into this problem? At this point, I'm willing to just boot into the service partition and set the machine up from scratch.

Yeah...

When you create the image of the full drive, you need to make sure the option for including the boot sector information is selected in the option menu or in a command line switch.

Here's an old post on the topic:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

Hmm, I'm using Ghost 2003, so I'll check that out. Thanks.

Good to know, since i'll be doing this same thing (though using Acronis True Image) this weekend when my X60t gets here.

Try this quick fix before going through re-imaging if you still have the cloned disks. The assumption, of course, is that the machines are running Win XP rather than Vista or something else.


Get a Windows XP disk, boot from it.

It has to be Win XP - a recovery disk will not do.

Go through the prompts and choose the 'Repair' option when that is given.

At the prompt after entering your Windows administrator password, type

fixmbr

and follow the prompts. When that is done, type

fixboot

and follow the prompts.

At that point, if all went well, the imaged drive will boot OK.

I'd be curious to see if fixmbr works...I thought I had heard of people trying to install a new drive and install a new version of XP and it didn't work. I had thought the recent Thinkpads uses some special bootloader that Lenovo puts on the machine.

An update to this. I used Ghost 2003, and added the -IB command line, and it worked great. Thanks for the help smvp6459.