Thinkpads Forum

I've Googled lots of advice on this issue and are posting here because the techie community here is largely "boots on the ground" in actually _doing_, not guessing or hearsay how to do this.

I have a Lenovo R60 with the original 60 gig drive and XP Pro, handed down frm relatives without original installation CDs or documents. I want to replace the drive with the one from a PlayStation 3 which is a Toshiba MK1665GSX 160gig. I will be using a Ultra USB IDE - SATA Converter. I welcome any hints how to proceed and what cloning software and procedures to use. As an aside if it's possible, I also wish to partition the HD to accommodate Mint 17. It would be very helpful if I can do this. Any heads up how to do this.

Thanks for any assist!

Jim in NYC

You need software that can clone the XP partition onto a new disk and have it boot. The booting is the difficult part. A lot of times it takes two or three tries and a repair CD to get it to boot.

There are a lot of imaging programs out there. I use Aomei Backupper and Aomei Partition Assitant to do cloning and multiboot setups these days. Partition Assistant has a nice "rebuild mbr" function that helps in getting partitions transferred to new disks to boot. Unfortunately, it is not available in the free version.

I have a T60 multibooting Windows Xp, Vista and Mint. Mint needs much less disk space than Windows, I have it on a 12gb primary partition with a 4gb logical swap partition and Xp and Vista on primary partitions. One thing you should read up on before trying to multiboot is partitioning. The R60 will use the old mbr partitioning which is much easier to deal with but you still need to know something about booting and the difference between primary and logical partitions.

Just putting Xp on the new disk should be fairly easy. As I said, I use Aomei Backupper these days and use "sector by sector" clone with Xp and most times, it boots on the first try. There are lots of other programs that do the same thing. I've used the Easus program before with success and in the old days, I used Powerquest Drive Image.

see my post in this thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=119666
it is actually quite simple