T22 Failing HDD, how to make CDs? Copy restore partition?

[jeffcrilly]

I have a T22 with, I believe, a failing 32GB 5400rpm drive. win2k is the OS.

I'm managed to get the drive out of the machine. I have another desktop win2k machine I can use for cloning, etc. The TP does not have a CDRW drive. I do not have (afaict) install CDs from IBM. (I need to double check this, but I doubt I've got these.)

I'm thinking of getting another drive, and somehow cloning the restore partition off the old drive on to the new drive. I'd also like to keep costs down. There's a new machine on the way, but I'd like to keep this one usable.

I'm guessing acronis would do it. Is there another way? Can I partition and format the new HDD in win2k, then copy over the restore partition from the old drive? Do the "trial" installs of these HDD cloning apps have enough enabled to get me back on my feet?

thanks in advance for any strategies, pointers to instructions, etc.

jeff

[MadeInJapan]

I was facing the same issue exactly in a friend's laptop (non-thinkpad) and I was able to get the hdd out of her computer and into my 2nd hdd adapter to copy off files onto my T30 for adding back to her new drive she is buying for her laptop. That's when I noticed a "Restore" partition and thought how easy it would be just to clone that partition. However, I ran into trouble. Even within windows, and trying to copy just files, the bad hdd was too far gone and I kept getting disconnect errors from it. I did a SeaTools scan within her laptop to see what the errors were and found over 30 unreadable HDD sectors, so the TOSHIBA drive in her laptop is trash. I was going to partition a her new drive with the same size partition she had for the "restore" partition on her old drive (using FDISK...old Win98 method) and name it exactly the same as her restore partition, and then try to just clone partition to partition using Ghost (I'm sure Acronis would do fine too), but her HDD was too far gone and too broken to even attempt this.

My suggestion is to figure out the exact size of the restore partition, and the exact spelling of the name of that partition by FDISKing the "breaking" hdd first. This will also tell you if the partition is active or not...this is important. If you don't mess with the breaking HDD too much you might still be able to read all of the sectors in the restore partition and be successful at the clone. I wish you luck in your attempt here...Please post back and let us know how things went.

Fortunately for my friend, her NEC laptop is still under warranty, so all she has to do is send her machine in and the hdd will be replaced. I have told her to tell NEC NOT to put a TOSHIBA hdd back in if possible....my experience with them is that they are very weak and have a high crash and burn rate. Bad news is that she's lost everything on her drive and we have not been able to salvage any of the data.

[jeffcrilly]

The thing with copying the restore partition -- It has to be bootable so the TP bios can boot it on F11. I suppose this is doable w/ fdisk. (Been a while since I've used it.)

I'm going to give g4u a whirl. http://fbim.fh-regensburg.de/~feyrer/g4u/

(Btw, I think I can get a decent drive locally -- 60gb 5400rpm hitachi for $106 - not great, its a retail store, but its local.)

I figure the 7200 in the T22 would work; I just suspect the 5400 would be less crash prone, from the fact that the TPs have the airbag thing.
(Hmm. possibly both have the same crash worthiness?)

jeff

[jeffcrilly]

Just an update on the outcome of all this disk replacement hassle....

After messing around a bunch w/ the cloned disk.. it seemed like it just didnt want to boot on the T22. (Btw, it booted fine on the desktop win2k machine where I did the clone... didnt have the right drivers, but it did boot. Hmm.) Anyhow, its possible that if I did the clone on the TP (or imaged/restored) it might work.

Instead, I just broke down and installed OEM WinXP (with some new hardware of course), and it runs much better than before. (I'm sorta amazed how efficent XP is on the PIII 512meg machine.

Fwiw, XP on the T22 worked out of the box, except for the ACPI power mgmt. I downloaded all the drivers from ibm.com (via the ibm "software installer") and now it appears all issues are gone.

Fyi, I'm also using an orinoco gold card - when I installed those drivers and wireless manager, I lost the windows-fast-user-switch funcitonality. Fortunately, I was able to revert to windows wireless mgmt which works fine, even for my wifi security setup.

jeff

[dsvochak]

I assume this is the same machine as the other thread:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=16986

I'm glad you got it worked out.

"I'm sorta amazed how efficent XP is on the PIII 512meg machine"

Which is, in large part why I'm still using a T21 & T23's instead of a T4X