Hard drive replacement and partitioning

[edinburghphoto]

Hi All and greetings from Scotland.

I've just acquired an ex-demonstration X61 to replace my faithful X31. There are no OS CDs, recovery CDs or manuals. Just the X61. It has Windows Vista Business which is part of the standard build. I have an X6 dock with a CD-R drive.

My plan is to replace the standard 80Gb 5400rpm drive with a Hitachi 7K200 7200rpm. Changing the drive seems simple enough, but how do I configure the partitions and move the copy of Vista over from the existing drive? From other posts on the forum, I believe there are a couple of hidden/service partitions to hold the OS installer and drivers.

This is my first post - thanks for your patience. Apologies if I've missed anything important. Your advice will be much appreciated.

[gerdh]

Hello, I had the same task to do and was also working off a refurbished "demonstration" unit.

- go to "Create Recovery Discs" - takes each a writable a CD and a DVD
- use recovery discs and apply to new drive
- update image on new drive online to latest greatest...

Gerd

[edinburghphoto]

Many thanks for the information Gerd.

[hyperq]

Just google "Gparted clonezilla live cd". It can backup partitions to local disks, NFS, SAMBA, etc. Backing up disks or partitions are now so simple with this CD, I am actually doing more backups now.

[henrikb]

Does anyone know if Clonezilla can be used to also backup the hidden recovery partition on a Thinkpad X60/X61?

[hyperq]

Does anyone know if Clonezilla can be used to also backup the hidden recovery partition on a Thinkpad X60/X61?

The hidden partition is hidden when you are in Windows, but it is not hidden when you boot into clonezilla. It should show up on the list of current partitions in clonezilla.