Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I have read a great deal on these excellent forums on the topic of cloning my original Hitachi 80gb 5400rpm HDD to a new Seagate 160GB 7200rpm HDD.

I have a working acronis boot disc, and I bought a WD Passport external USB 160GB HDD to use as the enclosure.

OK, here's the problem - my Hitachi HDD is not recognized by either Acronis, or another Windows machine when installed in the WD passport enclosure. I thought I might have damaged either HDD or enclosure while transferring the HDD from the laptop to the enclosure, but I returned the original HDD to the laptop, and it works fine, and I tried 2 other SATA drives in the passport enclosure, and they both work fine, so I think it must be a compatibility issue with the HDD. I don't have another sata enclosure to test out the HDD with.

The only possible explanation that I have noticed is that there are no jumpers on the original HDD from the thinkpad, so I wonder if it was modified in some way to prevent it being used in an external enclosure.

I bought the WD Passport would ensure compatibility.

Any other ideas?

Have you by any chance set a hdd password in your X60?

No.

This is really puzzling.

I'm now trying a plan B - I've got a recovery disc set made, and I will backup using the Rescue and Recovery mode from windows onto the usb hdd, and then restore using the recovery CD.

Will this work?

ro-76 wrote:Hi,

I have a working acronis boot disc, and I bought a WD Passport external USB 160GB HDD to use as the enclosure.

.....

my Hitachi HDD is not recognized by either Acronis, or another Windows machine when installed in the WD passport enclosure.

Does WD really sell an external USB enclosure for use with any SATA HD or did you just bust open a WD external USB drive and substitute the internal WD drive with your Hitachi?

I opened it up - very simple to do.

The CD with HDD backup seems to have worked. the service partition seems a lot smaller on the new drive - now 591MB.

All working well, I think.

The service partition on your X60 never was and cannot be 591 mb while still having the same contents as the machine was shipped with. I'm not able to understand what has transpired with your clone, but it appears that you have not actually cloned your hard drive, if to "clone" means to make a real and complete copy from one disk to another.

I just succeeded in cloning the HDD using a cheap sata enclosure from eBay.

So, I guess the hdd in my thinkpad is not compatible with the WD enclosure.

ro-76 wrote:I just succeeded in cloning the HDD using a cheap sata enclosure from eBay.

Your WD enclosure is not designed to be compatible with anything but WD drives, so it its pure potluck if another brand of drive works in a WD enclosure. There has been quite a bit about this on numerous general PC forums.

It has nothing to do with your ThinkPad not being compatible with the HD enclosure.

Cheers,

Bill B.