The dreaded upgrade-the-disk (and no boot) problem

[tbentley]

Folks,

Glad to find this forum and would appreciate some advice. I have the usual disk upgrade problem, and have gone through these steps to diagnose it:

I removed my 12G disk from my T20, and used my desktop and Ghost to clone it to a 40Gig Samsung. The resulting clone can be read in the desktop, but will not boot in the T20. The T20 BIOS recognizes the disk.

I used the Ghost -IB switch. I examined the partition with Partition Doctor and noticed that the stock T20 12G IBM disk, which boots fine in the T20, does not seem to have a "standard" boot record -- or at least Partition Doctor couldn't make sense of it and identified it as an error.

I booted the T20 from a Windows SP2 CD, and I'm able to access the files on the Samsung. FIXMBR flagged that I "had a non-standard boot record" on the Samsung, but with nothing to lose, I executed it. No change and the partition is still accessible. Still does not boot.

I upgraded the T20 to BIOS 1.22 successfully. Again, the Samsung is BIOS-recognized but will not boot.

Ran chkdsk successfully on the Samsung from the recovery console.

SO: I've reviewed all the tips I can find on this site, and it appears that IBM uses a non-standard MBR. None of my tools seem to fix it (even though fixing it is essentially to make it non-standard).

I was tempted to reinstall Windows, but I suspect that the problem is IBM-Samsung and don't want to waste the hour it'll take to put up Windows

Is anyone aware of a tool that "fixes" the MBR on a non-IBM disk so it works like IBM expects it to?

Thanks very much--

Terry

[MadeInJapan]

Did you copy partition to partition or drive to drive. With my Ghost V.7, I'm able to do Drive to Drive if the second drive is the same size or larger and get MBR and everything else correctly. Problem might be doing it in the desktop...does your computer have a 2nd Hdd option? If so, this will work better. It's how I do it with both my 600E and T30, in which the drives are cloned as a "back-up" precaution once a week.

[tbentley]

Thanks. I was using DtoD cloning.

I came across a comment elsewhere that cloning in a desktop sometimes didn't work when the drive was placed back in the Thinkpad. I ebay'd an ultradrivebay and will try cloning the disk that way. I'll let the Board know how it works out.

T

[tbentley]

Closure on this one.

It turns out that a Ghost from the smaller system drive to a larger drive in the Thinkpad with an ultradrive bay does the job. The ultradrivebay is about $30 on ebay.

Just in case, I used the ghost -IB switch, but don't know if it was needed. Didn't hurt.

Format the target before you Ghost to it.

I could have saved a lot of grief if I'd known this, but hope this saves others. You cannot Ghost a disk in your desktop, as far as I can tell. The desktop can't make sense of a part of the Thinkpad's disk's boot record.

In an ultradrive bay it was a piece of cake.

[SeanM]

Drive geometry.