new/larger/backup USB drive for A21

[PPLepew]

I want to upgrade an A21M (2628-E1U) hard drive from 10Gb (wow) to a 40-80Gb. I plan to GHOST old to new and swap them, keeping the 10Gb as data backup. A few questions:

1- is the new size supported? What's the max size if not.
2- is either drive supported in a USB external drive enclosure.
3- will the USB port power the external drive?
4- will GHOST copy will be 'bootable' after the swap?

Thanks

[mediasponge]

1- This is a tough one, as it's BIOS dependent. I can't find anything in the A21m BIOS rev history that adds support for more drives. Lenovo does list a 30GB as an option to an a21m , so 40 is probably safe. The 60 and 80 GB drives are plentiful. What OS are you running? There are limits on bootable hard drive partitions in Win98, etc.

2- My experience is that IBM used some unique formatting parameters that made their drives unusable in anything outside the laptop, unless you reformat. If you do reformat, no problems. This also means you can't format a new drive in anything but the laptop, if you want to use it in the laptop.

3- External 2.5 enclosures are usually USB powered. I use an external 3.5" 250GB drive, which has a separate power supply.

4- If you do a perfect "clone" of the existing hard drive to a larger one, with a new destination partition size, yes. I used Acronis True Image with a A31p, and the new Fujitsu 120GB booted just fine, and I still have the hidden service partition. What you have to do is take a full "image" of the hard drive to a large external USB drive, remove the old internal drive and replace it with the new target drive, then boot from a CD and load the image from the USB drive onto the replacement internal drive. This essentially means you need 3 drives (old, new, USB).

Be aware that running any kind of disk image through a USB 1.1 port is REAL SLOW. I recently added a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card to my A31p for this reason.

I want to upgrade an A21M (2628-E1U) hard drive from 10Gb (wow) to a 40-80Gb. I plan to GHOST old to new and swap them, keeping the 10Gb as data backup. A few questions:

1- is the new size supported? What's the max size if not.
2- is either drive supported in a USB external drive enclosure.
3- will the USB port power the external drive?
4- will GHOST copy will be 'bootable' after the swap?

Thanks

[PPLepew]

Too many variables. I'll try to borrow an external USB drive and try it out before I invest. I'll post findings here later.
Thanks