Cloning and Imaging T60P

[taichi]

That FRU is the correct one for the Lenovo part.

How large ot a drive can I put in an Ultrabay? Before I upgrade to Win 7, my OS is Vista. Is there any restriction to the size of mobile drive I use?

If I were to clone to the Ultrabay drive, does the T60P and the OS know to boot from the original drive, or is there the possibility of a conflict between the two drives?

[dr_st]

I would not suggest booting with both drives connected after the clone. Vista/7 are supposed to be smarter than XP, but strange issues due to drive letter assignments can happen (look for my linked post earlier in this thread).

[taichi]

What about making images, or bootable images on the Ultrabay drive? Can the Ultrabay drive stay connected in such a scenario?

[dr_st]

I think so.

[taichi]

Any idea on how large a capacity drive can be used?

[Shredder11]

I've only used the original HDD drives in the Ultrabay, as I have usually been replacing them with an SSD. So most of those were not that big, e.g. as little as 160GB but I am pretty sure I have read of other people using 500GB and maybe more.

[Cigarguy]

I've got a 1 TB Hitachi in mine. I'm sure it will accommodate 2 TB if and when they make 2 TB 2.5" HDD easily available.

[taichi]

There's this:

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Drives-2 ... B00MBLX332

I've never been a fan of Seagate, and it's only 5400 RPM, but it is 2 TB. Has anyone tried it?

[RealBlackStuff]

I have a very similar one in my desktop: Lenovo 4XB0F18667, which is a 3.5" 2TB 7200rpm 6Gbps drive.
The Lenovo drive turned out to be a Seagate ST2000DM001-1ER164, I got it brand new last October for a song ($51.80).
I run Seatools for Windows every week, so far no problems.
But if I had known that the Lenovo drive was a Seagate, I wouldn't have bought it.
Anyway, it gets backed up regularly on an external Samsung HD.

Bought that Lenovo drive after my TWO Toshiba E300 1TB 5700rpm desktop drives both failed on the same day after only 3-1/2 months!
Toshiba refunded me fully for those failed drives, but I'll never buy Toshiba again!

[taichi]

My current drive is a Western Digital Scorpio Black 500 GB, which I like very much. Now the line is simply called Black, and goes up to 1 TB in the form factor the T60P can use. I wish they made a 2TB or larger. I also had good luck with Hitachi, which is now owned by WD, althought the Hitachi original brand supposedly lives on in a subsidiary HGST.

I bought and returned a 4TB WD My Passport, thinking it would be good for storing multiple images from this and another laptop. Amazon sent it in a ridiculously thin bubblewrap envelope, in contrast to WD's apparent policy of double boxing with 2 inches of bubblewrap. I bought an Anker powered USB hub to power the drive.

Now I'm torn between an Ultrabay Drive for images or cloning, the My Passport for imaging, or a separate USB enclosure for swapping and cloning, external to internal.

[taichi]

Still wondering if an UltraBay mounted hard drive overcomes the "potential" problem encountered in cloning to an external drive. Also, as I broached before, is the UltraBay mounted drive ever looked at by the OS as a boot drive (or a C Drive), or does the OS always default to the primary internal as boot drive?

[dr_st]

Still wondering if an UltraBay mounted hard drive overcomes the "potential" problem encountered in cloning to an external drive.

Not knowing what the "problem" is, it is hard to answer that. To the best of my knowledge, there was never a definitive root cause and explanation, just a bunch of folks for whom it didn't work.

Also, as I broached before, is the UltraBay mounted drive ever looked at by the OS as a boot drive (or a C Drive), or does the OS always default to the primary internal as boot drive?

The BIOS determines which drive to boot from. Once booting, "boot" drive and "C" drive need not be the same thing. The letter assignment process by an OS can get somewhat complicated and not always easy to predict.

[taichi]

I first encountered the problem when I tried to use the Apricorn Hard Drive Upgrade cloning...always successful with my A21P...with the T60P. the failure led me back to Apricorn, who told me that the drives must be swapped, to clone into the newer laptop. Then I read that this was a peculiaroty with later Thinkpads, and may have been designed in for security in Enterprise environments.

Since then I have read about the "problem" in many places, but I realize that some programs seem to overcome the hurdle. And I read of some who were able to clone, with seemin success, but were unable to boot from the clone, or encountered other problems. And of course there are others for whom this wasn't true.

I know that you can go into the BIOS to change boot options, but I was basically talking about defaults. But you're right about the trickiness of drive letter assignments.