NIGHTMARE T41 2373 Hard drive upgrade

[TJ]

Have spent all day trying to upgrade the hard drive, have used a Toshiba 100GB drive in the ultra bay have ghosted all four partitions across have run CHKDSK to verify no errors, have updated BIOS and 1GB ram. All looks good from the ultrabay but when you swap into the main bay the log in does not get past the Windows XP picture it doesn't load the users.
It then looks like the whole drive has gone bad when back in the ultrabay and viewed from Partition magic. Reclone the C drive across to the partition and all looks good again and run Windows CHKDSK and all seems fine and healthy on all partitions

ANyone help? Is 100GB too big for the T41 am at my wits end

[mysbca]

100GB drive should not be a problem.
Did you happen to boot into Windows with the cloned drive still in the ultrabay after you cloned it? The clone (MBR?) gets messed up when you do that. You need to pull the cloned drive out before rebooting.

See the third point in the last post of this thread:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=15580

[draco2527]

100GB drive should not be a problem.[/i]

It is not! I am running a 5400rpm 100GB seagate on the T41.

[TJ]

Yes I restarted with the clone drive still in
I shall re clone using partition magic adn before exiting to windows pull the newly cloned drive out
Can you boot off the ultrabay by altering the BIOS it looks like you can but each time it defaults back t the C drive

I'll give it a go
Will let you know

[TJ]

Ghost 2003 doesn't work even if you take the ultra bay out, in the end I used the approach a guy posted on his T42
downloaded acronis demo (real difficulty installing even after registering on the web site - had a sales guy send me a link with no registration
cloned to the ultra bay in a oner using the manual settings which maintained but resized my partitions,
took out ultra bay before restart
swapped across and bingo

Will buy the full version shortly

Interestingly Partition magic now thinks the old drive is bad when computer management tool says all healthy?

Also ran full chkdsk on the new c partition just to ensure all fine

I will be clonig the partitions across to the second hard drive as a back up ongoing

[TJ]

In my opinion, it did NOT work out. He had to reinstall everything.

I'm posting how I [finally] managed to clone my drive in the same situation.

SCENARIO:
WinXPSP2 on Thinkpad T42, using the factory load for the install.
This means a hidden partition for the 'rapid recovery' stuff is on the drive.
See the appendix note about IBM partition table.

OBJECTIVE:
Somehow clone the current install of XP onto a larger (Seagate Momentus) hard drive.

WHAT WORKED:
Hitachi 2.0 USB enclosure for 2.5" notebook was used as 'destination' drive
Trial version of Acronis True Image [trueimage9.0_d_en.exe] was d/l'd and installed in windows
In Acronis, I chose 'disk clone'
Use the manual / advanced mode
I chose to 'leave the partitions as-is'
Let the clone run...be glad that I'm using a usb 2.0 enclosure now.
Shut down and swap the drive from usb enclosure into laptop
Restart laptop
vici!
The drive boots.
In drive storage applet, I can see that I still have the 4gb hidden partition.
I install partition magic 8.0 for windows
I use PM to move the 4gb ibm_service partition to the end of the drive, and to resize the C partition to fill the drive.
Changes don't require a reboot.
At this point...success.
The clone boots. The system partition is intact. I'm leaving the system partition because I don't want to press my luck. If I had more time I would delete it (using Pmagic from windows).




WHAT DIDN'T WORK:
Several image attempts, several drive clone attempts. I'll list most of them, because it REALLY SUCKED to go through this. Thanks IBM, for the nonstandard partitioning.

Note that it's better w/NT based systems to use ghost to make an image and restore the image. Disc to disc has high failure rate.

I tried to use Ghost 8.0, 9.0, and 2003 boot disk to make an image of 'the partition' and then restore the image to another drive. Yes, I tried all three.

I tried to use Ghost 8.0, 9.0, and 2003 boot disk to make an image of 'the drive' and then restore the image to another drive. That's right, SIX image attempts. At least. With a usb 1.1 enclosure.

All imaged clones failed to boot. I had the 'NTLDR.DLL is missing' error message in all scenarios.

I tried sys'ing C and then running fixmbr and fixboot from the XP recovery CD, per this post
http://archive.midrange.com/pctech/200409/msg00046.html
That didn't work

I booted with an XP full install (not upgrade install) CD and chose ENTER for setup (not R for recovery console) and then chose the REPAIR install option (you can often get this from an xp full install disk). The repair didn't fix anything.

Using the three magic files to boot from floppy doesn't work with XP, so I couldn't try this guy's "use disk investigator to make lots of copies of files that are in too high of a sector" trick.
http://www.mcse.ms/message1263055.html
I did try using a 2k boot disk...after which the drive could show me 'starting win2k' bootloader before a gloriuos BSOD

Using Ghost 10.0 from windows (note that it doesn't have a bootable disk anymore) to "copy the drive to another" didn't work. I still got the NTLDLR is missing error.
Interesting... G10.0 set the IBM_Service partition drive 'active' and c:on the destination. Maybe the other attempts did the same; i never noticed.
I THINK that editing boot.ini to use the secodn partition would have let me boot this way...but then I'm stuck with booting to drive D and all my proggies fail. Sure there are ways around this...I didn't explore them. I booted from the source disk and removed th the IBM service partition from the destination disk. The destination disk now gives 'blinking cursor in top left' when I tried to boot. Editing boot.ini probably would have been smarter.


At this point I have acquired a USB 2.0 enclosure which came with a drive and "hitachi travelstar hard drive upgrade CD"
THis is a bootable cd. I try to CLONE DISK.
I use 'automatic' setting. That fails.
I try again and use 'manual' setting and let it 'expand partions' even though this means an 11gb Ibm_service partition.
Again, the ntldr.dll is missing message.

At this point I decided to try the 15day trial of acronis. The hitachi drive software is obviously an OEM product based on acronis. THe hitachi drive didn't have the option to 'leave as is' or maybe I didn't see it. That apparently was the important part.


APPENDIX I: IBM Partition Table whackiness

Note that PartitionMagic Boot disk thinks that an IBM with factory load is "bad partition table' and can't perform operations. Apparently IBM uses 255 heads when everyone else uses 240? Whatever the reason...you can't use PMagic8 boot on an IBM T series w/factory load. This is observed on a T21, T30, T42, T43, and T43p.