Please help :Where to restore 0x12 partition and the MBR?

[peter-h]

I am trying to replace a 60GB HD with a 80GB SSD. Using Trueimage v10 - it looks like it ought to work. I did a backup using sector-by-sector of the whole HD (MBR, the 0x12 partition, and the C partition). However, restoring it, I get various options and they are not obvious, and also some of them are greyed-out for no reason I can understand.

I seem to be able to restore the 0x12 partition to anywhere on the HD - logically I would think it should be the beginning or the end of it. Which should I use?

Where should the MBR go, or is there no option (i.e. it always goes at the beginning?)?

I have no trouble restoring it so it boots into windoze (the active C partition) but then the big blue button doesn't do anything except get into the BIOS. All the diagnostics are gone. I think I put the 0x12 partition at the start of the HD and this seems to be wrong.

I would really appreciate any clues...

[peter-h]

The basic issue is that while TI allows you to do a sector by sector backup of the whole HD, it does not offer to simply restore this backup.

It asks some questions e.g. where do I want to put partition 1-2. What does that mean?

Why doesn't it just restore the backup??? The only question it should ask is where you want to restore all the stuff (as if it wasn't obvious - there is only ONE HD present).

The new HD (an SSD) is "same" size as the old one (80GB).

But, just in case the new one is a few bytes smaller, I restored the MBR and the 4GB 0x12 partition, not using sector by sector mode for now, to the end of the HD (which is where it was before), and then in a separate recovery operation I restored the C partition (into the space at the begginning of the HD) and for good measure I reduced it in size from 70.18GB to 70GB. Windoze still boots OK (as it did when the 0x12 partition was at the start of the HD) but again the IBM recovery software doesn't work; the blue buttom followed by F11 just hangs with a blank screen. One can only get into the BIOS.

I wonder if IBM somehow hard-coded the location of the recovery code?

It is also not clear if the 0x12 partition should be restored as Logical or Primary, etc.

I am now trying a 2-step process:

(1) Recovering the MBR and the 0x12 partition sector by sector (this no longer asks me where I want them on the target HD, which is what would be expected). The partition will be Primary.

(2) Recovering the C partition into the remaining space (the ~ 70GB at the start of the HD). Curiously, I found that TI does not allow this remaining space to be selected when the restore is attempted in the sector by sector mode, which suggests that the new HD is indeed a tiny bit smaller than the old one!

The above steps produced a working IBM recovery partition but windows does not boot... the laptop says "Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration" (which looks curiously like the WinXP setup CD) and goes straight into the IBM utilities. So next I am recovering the 0x12 partition as Logical; that is about the only option.

I have also noticed that the Intel "80GB" HD shows in Trueimage as 74GB....

[Harryc]

My understanding is that the recovery partition is at the very end of the hard drive. I do know that you also have to clone the MBR. TI should let you do that. Perhaps that is your booting issue.

[peter-h]

I tried restoring the MBR+ the 0x12 partition first, as a Logical partition, and then fitting the C partition into the remaining space, but it does not work. F11 at bootup just hangs the machine. The BIOS entry (F1) works, and windoze boots OK.

The MBR has to be at the start of the HD, so I next tried restoring the MBR (there was no option for where to put this; presumably it has to go at the beginning of the drive), then the 0x12 partition at the end of the drive (cannot do sector-by-sector as this suppresses the option to move it to the end of the drive), and then the C partition into the space between the MBR and the 0x12 partition.

I marked the 0x12 Primary, and the Active flag cannot be unchecked (it is greyed-out). I noticed from the backup that it was a Primary partition there too, but was not active... one hopes that windoze will see the C partition first and will try loading it first.

This loads windoze OK but pressing the blue button and then F11 at bootup just puts up "NTLDR is missing, press ctrl-alt-del to restart". So it looks like the IBM recovery partition access is somehow corrupted. I am going to give up on this now.