help,hard drive transfer problem & Hitachi Travelstar 7K320

[syrahnose]

i just bought an Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 320GB 7200 to put in my x60s and wanted to clone my old hd over to it. Put in an external enclosure and plugged via usb to my laptop and it doesn't show up on 'My Computer.' I can hear it spinning and ext enclosure's light is on. I plugged it into another laptop, which said it recognized new hardware and installed drivers, but it also doesn't show up under 'my computer.'

Do I need to format this? i was going to download acronis trueimage to do the clone but I'm worried the new hard drive isn't working.

[Marin85]

Try following: go to disk management console (somewhere under admin tools/computer management/storage) -> initialize the drive...

You will also have to format the drive.

(You should be able to see the drive in the disk management in any case since the HD doesn´t seem to be faulty. Then some of the two things suggested above should work out for you...)

Hope this helps

Marin

[EOMtp]

i just bought an Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 320GB 7200 ... Put in an external enclosure and plugged via usb to my laptop ...

Regardless if the new drive is recognized or not in the external enclosure, you must place the new drive in the main drive bay and place the old drive in the external enclosure when you clone the old drive onto the new drive.

With the new drive in the primary drive bay, one stands a good chance of ending up with a bootable drive, but even if it does not end up being bootable, one can repair the MBR (Master Boot Record) on the drive and then it will be bootable. These cloning operations are not 100 percent reliable in yielding a bootable drives, but seldom do not yield a bootable drive for a Thinkpad if the target drive is connected via USB.

[syrahnose]

I read on one of the other 'cloning' posts that it's best to clone a completely unused drive. does that mean unformated and uninitialized. The other big issue seems to be that acronis true image trial doesn't work when cloning a bootable new drive from an old one. Although it says its fully functional.
I assume if acronis does actualy work that I have to boot up using a cd from an external drive for my x60s. And will try the new clean on inside the x60s and old one from ext enclosure.

Sorry to be so cautious, but I've never done any of this before.