R51 disk upgrade

[beck]

This is mostly for anyone else thinking about upgrading their drive in an R51. No questions.

Took me days to find the right tools that would work for me, but I now have a WD 160GB drive installed in my R51. It should have been a simple job, but I obviously have bad disk karma.

I have an external USB 160GB drive that is Maxtor. I figured I could copy the 80GB original partition over to that with Maxblast and copy it to the new drive once that was installed. Nope. Maxblast couldn't see the USB drive.

Couldn't use the WD tools since the original drive wasn't WD.

Couldn't use the IBM rescue and recovery tools because they would get an error. One version got an error in the copy over and another version got an error in the copy back.

What worked for me was EASEUS disk copy (free) to copy the partition to the external drive and copy it back to the new drive. It's slow and the copy took a couple hours each way, but it worked and was free.

Used Unbuntu with Gpartd (free) to partition and format the new drive.

I tried many other tools but they each had a problem with something or another.

During all of this I was able to get the recovery tools and hidden partition onto the new drive once. But it's gone now. I'll try to put it back again in a few days.

Hopefully, I'll now be able to test Vista on my Thinkpad.

[cmarti]

If you hidded partition is deleted maybe it's too late, but the recommended program for thinkpad cloning is acronis true image.

You can even use the trial version because it is fully functional.