Switching hard drives

[EXCrosslink]

Hey guys,

I recently purchased a Thinkpad R51 and will be swapping the stock 4200rpm hard drive to a Seagate Momentus 40GB 5400rpm drive which is faster. I was wondering however, how I should go about cloning the entire hard drive over to the new drive, including the IBM PreDesktop Area partition?

I plan to use an external USB hard drive box with the Seagate inside for the cloning procedure with Norton Ghost but I keep getting a '40204: drive identification' error once I start the cloning. Could this be due to the hidden partition? I disabled the security for the PreDesktop Area in the BIOS prior to any attempts.

Do you guys have any alternatives or suggestions as to how i might proceed further? Thanks!


Best Regards,
Terry

[SeanM]

Are you booting to a Ghost diskette? You would have to load DOS-based USB drivers to allow the machine to see the drive in the USB caddy.

If that's the problem, I'd suggest getting a second hard drive adapter from IBM. It will allow you to put the other hard drive inside the machine, and you won't need drivers for it there.

[EXCrosslink]

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the reply! Yes the USB drivers are loaded and the drive is recognised. Actually now that I have a set of recovery CDs, I don't think I'll have much need for the entire hidden partition anymore so I might just clone the active partition alone.

Do you know how much an adapter like that would cost?


Thanks!

[Humpa]

$45.00 on IBM's site:
http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/store ... &storeId=1

[hhy2k]

you can clone with a simple USB drive adapter as well. it cost you $15 from ebaw S&H included. the entire thing works from under windows, you don't need any DOS nonsense.

if you don't need the hidden partition you just use a sharewate cloner like Acronis true image (free for 30 days)

if you need the hidden partition though, you have to have the recovery CD set. first you have to run that over the new drive.... just the first part though, not the OS loading part. when it is done you can interrupt the recovery process, swap drives and copy (clone) the OS partition. it'll work fine and will have the 3 GB recovery option.... it is nice to have I guess

[MadeInJapan]

I use Norton Ghost 7 from a floppy (connected by cable to parallel port) with 2nd drive in the HHD adapter in CD/DVD rom slot...Ultrabay. This works great and only takes 15 minutes or so for the entire process.

The only time I got errors like the one described above was when the source drive was terribly fragmented. Defragment the source drive first and then try again. It works for me every time!

P.S. I believe if you do "disk to disk" and not "partition to partition," Ghost takes care of cloning the hidden partition as well, but I personally got rid of that on my T30. BTW, "rapid restore" is also disabled in Windows. With a cloned drive always ready to use if I have any problem I don't see the need for all of these features.

On a side note, if you enable full capacity (as one large partition) on the target HHD and use "partition to partition" in ghost, copying the visible (non-hidden) partition from the source drive, then through your cloning process you should be able to make your new drive one without the revovery partition. Just a thought.