Cloning to a Hitachi 7K100 in X31 -- what am I missing?

[tomh009]

I feel pretty dumb, but I have to admit that I'm stymied. I'm upgrading our X31 and while the memory upgrade was a piece of cake, the disk swap has me stumped. I'm trying to replace the original 4200 rpm 40GB disk with a Hitach 7K100 -- which actually was in my other X31 a few years ago.

I've cloned the disk (external USB to external USB, using my X200s as the host), using both Acronis and Ghost (though Acronis did not resize the partition the fit the new disk ... strange). The resulting target disk looks fine on the X200s, but when I insert it into the X31, the system won't boot. It won't even get to the Windows boot menu -- it simply hangs after the logo screen disappears.

If I use the Windows XP install disk, I can see the partition using the repair tools, and doing a repair installation happily replaces all the files in the Windows directory -- but won't boot after the restart. And the repair console (which sees the directory as well) won't accept the administrator password, so I can't run fixboot (I'm suspecting the boot sector is the problem here).

I don't see any BIOS settings that would make a difference. And I don't think a BIOS upgrade should be needed, either.

So what am I missing?

[GomJabbar]

My guess is the HPA is causing you trouble. Maybe you should remove it. To unhide it, you need to go to the BIOS menu > Security > IBM Predesktop Area, and disable it.

See this thread for more info: Format HDD with IBM Hidden Partition

Here are a couple more threads that may help:
1) Hard Drive Cloning HOW TO
2) More comprehensive guide to HDD cloning

[tomh009]

Thanks ... this certainly looks suspiciously close. The original disk shows up as 36 GiB rather than 40 GiB, and edbatista's symptoms are exactly the same as mine:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=26110

I tried a quick test of disabling the PDA on the X31, and booting with the new drive. No joy. I think I'll try disabling the PDA on the old drive in the morning, and redoing the clone. I don't really care much about keeping the HPA, but as long as I can get the cloning to succeed, I'll take it with or without HPA.

Thanks again for the tips!

[RealBlackStuff]

Take an image (Acronis) of your old HD, with Acronis installed on a PC, and the X31 HD in the USB enclosure.
Save the image on the PC. Swap the HD in the USB enclosure and Restore the image onto the 7K100.
With the Acronis aptions you should be able to resize the receiving HD.
If not for some reason, create a second partition for data, using Start/Run/diskmgmt.msc when the HD is back in the X31.

[tomh009]

Basically that's the approach I took -- I had both the original disk and the 7K100 connected to the X200s using USB enclosures, and used Acronis (and Ghost) to copy the disk over. No luck, the disk won't boot. I retried this morning, disabling the HPA on the X31, then doing the clone, but it didn't help, either.

My new plan is to format the 7K100 using the recovery CDs, and then clone over just the C: partition ...

[GomJabbar]

You should have the target drive in the machine it will be used in during the cloning operation. Drive Geometry errors can occur otherwise. Sometimes you need to low level format (zero out) the target drive before cloning. There are tools for doing this. Hitachi Drive Fitness Test

[tomh009]

Drive geometry is OK as the Windows XP install CD correctly detects (and repairs) the Windows directory. But it still won't boot.

[tomh009]

So did two more attempts today, both with Acronis TrueImage 10, PDA set to Normal. Once in Windows (USB to UltraBay) on another X31 with more recent firmware. Everything looked successful, but no joy in getting the X31 to boot.

Second attempt we booted the X31 (the one we've been trying to upgrade) from an Acronis CD mounted in the Ultrabase, and then cloned from USB to internal drive bay. This one took longer, 40 minutes instead of 25 in Windows -- but once it was all done, the X31 booted right into Windows! Not to mention that it feels soooo much faster with the 7K100 instead of the old 40GB 4200 rpm drive.

So the end result is good. However, I am still mystified why doing the cloning on either my X200s or on another X31 did not work.

[GomJabbar]

I believe it boils down to hard drive geometry as seen by the BIOS.

Paul Pavlik's thread: Cloning T60 With Apricorn (Update)

See post #14 by Dan Goodell: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops

[tomh009]

Drive geometry would explain it ... except that I still don't understand why two X31s would detect a different drive geometry? Compared to my X200s, yes, that sounds more feasible, but these were near-identical machines ...

[GomJabbar]

Perhaps the Predesktop Area was disabled in one and enabled in the other?
Alternatively, maybe only one of the X31 BIOS's knew how to throw PARTIES with BEER.

Here is an interesting document that explains some of the changes that went about during the time the X31 was produced. Just look at pages 6-10 with the graphics to see what I mean.

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/th ... r20mst.pdf

Here is another link to a document about the Predesktop Area.
Predesktop Area white paper - Access IBM

[tomh009]

Both X31s had PDA set to "normal". Bah, I give up, at least it works now! And with the 7K100, a bump to 1.3 GB, "a" wireless and a new keyboard, there is now a whole lot of life left in the old X31.