Upgrade HDD on R40->problem with detecting USB HDD

[richinek]

Hi,

I have a ThinkPad R40, 2722, IDE HDD 40 GB. I bought a new IDE HDD 160 GB (Seagate) and want to change the old one.

My plan is following:

1. Prepare a IDE-TO-USB converter.

2. Prepare a THIRD (intermediate) HDD (6GB is enough, I used an old drive from some old Toshiba laptop, but generally you can use any USB drive for that (as long as it can be formatted with FAT32).

3. Prepare a bootable Windows 95 or Windows 98 CD (again from one of my old machines).

4. Boot Windows normally from the old drive, then connect the intermediate drive over USB and format it using FAT32 filesystem. The choice of FAT32 is because the drive has to be visible after the machine is booted with DOS shell of Win 95/98.

5. Reboot and press the blue "Access IBM" button, then go to "Recover to factory..." and press F3 (undocumented) to exit to the DOS command shell.

6. Make sure the intermediate drive is visible (it mounted as drive D: in my case). Go to A:\RECOVERY (A: is a virtual drive mounted during the IBM recovery procedure) and launch FWBACKUP application:
fwbackup size=640 file=d:\backup
This will take fairly long time (2 hours+ in my case), and will produce a set of backup.nnn files on the intermediate drive.

7. Copy the FWRESTOR.EXE from A: to the intermediate drive (you will need this application to restore the backup.nnn files created in step 6).

8. Power off the machine, replace the old hard drive with a new, blank one. Leave the intermediate drive with backup files connected over USB.

9. Boot the computer with the Windows 9x CD (actually do not start Windows, just go to the DOS shell). From there go to the intermediate drive (still conencted over USB) and run:
fwrestor file=d:\backup
This will restore the predesktop area to the new drive. We are almost home...

10. Reboot, press the blue "Access IBM" and go to the "Recover to factory...". This will setup you a fresh copy of Windows XP, direct from the predesktop area, just transferred over the intermediate drive from your old to the new one.


Unfortunately I have not been able to "see" either my USB drive (FAT32) or CD-ROM drive when I F3 out to the Predesktop command prompt. USB option in BIOS is enabled, if I boot from a separate boot disk (Win98), I can see the USB connected FAT32 drive.

Why can't I see the USB HDD?

Thanks for your response.

[sjthinkpader]

Your operation is overly complex. Normal cloning with old drive in HDD slot and new drive in USB housing and cloning software in CD drive should work. I don't understand your need for an "intermediate" drive.