Replacing HDD

[veral]

Hi All,

I own a Z60m for several months now and I am very happy with it. I am about to replace the 5K HDD with a Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 and even thought I read a lot of threads in this forum I am still not sure how to proceed :
1. Insert the Hitachi in a ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter
2. Copy the rescue and recovery from the old drive to the new one
3. swap HDD, the old one going into the adapter
4. Use rescue and recovery to install the OS on the Hitachi
5. format the old drive

And here is my questions :
A/ Do I need to apply an IBM firmware on the Hitachi, there's a thread showing how but not telling why ?
B/ How do I transfer the hidden Rescue & Recovery partition from the old drive to the Hitachi ?
C/ And of course will all this be possible ?

Thanks for your help

I want to keep both drives because I often use virtual machines and using an USB HDD for them is beginning to be painfull.

[Ken Fox]

Hi All,

I own a Z60m for several months now and I am very happy with it. I am about to replace the 5K HDD with a Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 and even thought I read a lot of threads in this forum I am still not sure how to proceed :
1. Insert the Hitachi in a ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter
2. Copy the rescue and recovery from the old drive to the new one
3. swap HDD, the old one going into the adapter
4. Use rescue and recovery to install the OS on the Hitachi
5. format the old drive

And here is my questions :
A/ Do I need to apply an IBM firmware on the Hitachi, there's a thread showing how but not telling why ?
B/ How do I transfer the hidden Rescue & Recovery partition from the old drive to the Hitachi ?
C/ And of course will all this be possible ?

Thanks for your help

I want to keep both drives because I often use virtual machines and using an USB HDD for them is beginning to be painfull.

I would be reluctant to trust Rescue and Recovery to do this. If you don't have Norton Ghost or Truimmage, you can download a free trial version of Truimage (sp?) (there are links in many posts here; do a search on "Acronis")

Make a clone to the new drive in the bay adapter. With Acronis I don't know if you need to do something special to get the boot sector imaged properly but you do need to do this with Norton ghost, choosing the -1b switch which images the boot sector.

When you have cloned to the new drive in the tray adapter, turn off the computer, remove the battery and unplug, then swap the drives. Do NOT reboot with the old drive in the bay adapter as you will confuse Windows XP.

There are several tutorials on how to do this on this website including:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=24116

and

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=27721

NOTE: you do not need to do anything to the firmware on your drive. That is an issue specific to the T43 and does not apply to your Z model

[veral]

Thanks for these info.

So with a software like Norton Ghost I'll be able to transfer the hidden partition and use the Rescue & Recovery at boot time on the new hard drive to restore factory defaults.
Is that right ?

[GomJabbar]

And here is my questions :
A/ Do I need to apply an IBM firmware on the Hitachi, there's a thread showing how but not telling why ?
B/ How do I transfer the hidden Rescue & Recovery partition from the old drive to the Hitachi ?
C/ And of course will all this be possible ?

1) Generally you can only apply IBM firmware updates to drives that are purchased from IBM/Lenovo. A few forum members have successfully hacked the firmware update to work with non IBM drives, but this is a little risky. Really, I would not worry about hard drive firmware updates very much. Your new hard drive should work fine right out of the box. Just make sure you get the Serial ATA disk (SATA150), and not a PATA disk.

2) Cloning works fine for this, but you can also use the Product Recovery Discs to install all the IBM/Lenovo software, hidden partition, and Windows. You should definitely burn yourself a set. You can use 1 CD and 1 DVD or all CD's (~7). Go to Start > All Programs > ThinkVantage > Create Rescue Media > Create Recovery Discs. These discs work with empty hard drives. If you use them on a drive that has any data on it, all that data will be erased.

3) Of course it's possible. I believe Rescue and Recovery backups should also perform this operation, but I have not tried it myself. If you restore a Rescue and Recovery backup, your new hard drive will be set up the same as when the backup was made, just like with any backup program.

[LasseFJ]

I've been thinking about replacing the harddrive with a 7200 rpm drive, (my current drive is the standard drive from the ibm/lenovo, which only runs at 5200rpm).

I opened the panel and found out that it was a toshiba harddisk.... thats wierd.


To the question!
What about that neat "instant parking"-tech? Is that a tech that is on the motherboard, or is it the drive that has that tech?

by instant parking i mean Active Protection System...

I would want to replace the standard drive with a drive that doesn't have that feature...

[NS]

by instant parking i mean Active Protection System...

I would want to replace the standard drive with a drive that doesn't have that feature...

Your thinkpad will be in danger. Why would you want a drive without that HDD protection feature?

[LasseFJ]

I wouldn't, i didn't if the system was placed on the motherboard or the harddrive

[SkZuk]

Where is the best place / dealer to buy a 7200rpm 80Gb or greater HDD for my z60t 2511e4u? Is there anything I need to keep in mind when shipping or ordering? Canadian company?

[cj3209]

Try newegg.com or zipzoomfly.com although 7200 RPM SATA drives seem to be a bit scarce these days.

CJ