A30 Drive updating/cloning questions

[warnergt]

I was attempting to upgrade the drive in my ThinkPad A30. I put the new Seagate 100 GB drive in an Ultrabay HD adapter tray. I used the Seagate DiscWizard utility to clone the internal drive to the new drive in the Ultra bay.

After cloning, I swapped disks. The A30 booted up fine with the new drive.

Question 1: How can I tell if the hidden partition was copied?

Then, I attempted a Windows Update. It found five new files to install. I told it to go ahead but the update failed.
I reinstalled the original HD and did the Windows Update and the five files installed fine.

Question 2: Is there a known reason why my cloned drive won't properly perform the Windows update?

Some other notes: I noticed the cloned drive had a different volume name. Could that be a factor? Could a missing hidden partition be the reason the Windows update did not work?

[warnergt]

I have part of my answer.

If the hidden partition was not copied, you do not get a F11 Restore BIOS option when you reboot your machine. Instead of three options appearing in the lower left corner of the screen, you will only see two.

Apparently, Seagate DiscWizard did not copy the hidden partition.

So, I picked up Acronis True Image. It cloned my internal drive perfectly.

I still don't know why I could not successfully perform a Windows Update with the DiscWizard cloned drive which appeared to work otherwise. I may never know.

[tbartold]

I use the UBCD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ (freeware) and have never had a complaint doing a hard drive clone. Although, you do need to select the third (IIRC) hard drive cloner to make it copy the recovery partition.