Upgrading Hard Drives, Blinking Cursors, and the MBR

[Ken Fox]

I have had a rather frustrating last 36 hours. I think the problem, although obscure, is common, and fortunately it has an easy solution mentioned matter-of-factly in a 2 month old post on this board. I literally stumbled upon this post just before I boxed up my new hard drive to send it back to Newegg, and it appears to have solved the problem.

The reason that I think the problem is common is that I have read a number of posts today (in searching for a solution to this problem) that suggest the problem is rather widespread -- failed drive upgrades using imaging or Thinkpad R&R software.

My tale of woe starts with the intended purchase of a closeout T43 directly from Lenovo, which I wanted to upgrade with a new 100gig, 7200rpm, Hitachi hard drive, an HTS721010G9AT00, a drive which has entire threads written about it on thinkpads.com. The ship date on my new system got delayed significantly and I canceled the order, however the new hard drive I had ordered for it arrived separately from Newegg. I could have sent the hard drive back for a refund, but with shipping charges and possible restocking fees, I decided to try it out in my X32, which already had a 60gig Hitachi 7200rpm drive from an earlier series. The new drive is a bit better at data transfer, uses less power, and of course, has more space.

OK. So I formatted the drive with Win XP using a USB2.0 adapter off of my desktop; no problems. I stuck the drive in the X32 and, using Norton Ghost 2003 from a floppy, put a drive image (on a portable USB HD) I'd made the day before onto the new drive. Everything went well.

On rebooting the X32, I got the preboot IBM screen, then a blinking cursor in the upper left corner; that was it. Multiple reboots later, nothing had changed. OK. Then I try a freestanding USB optical drive with my 1 week old Rescue and Recovery set in it. The first disk proceeds as expected and then is to reboot (this is before the majority of the contents are loaded on the drive). Nothing --- just that [censored] blinking cursor.

OK, I check the bios, how current is it (the latest), is anything amiss (no), I choose "set up defaults." No change. BUT -- the HD is recognized in the bios, it is clearly there.

OK. So I try to do a repair installation of Win XP (not the repair console; we'll get to that in a bit); everything goes fine but when we get to the point where the disk has the system reboot, I got, you guessed it, a blinking cursor in the upper left corner, nothing else.

So, I had a Win XP disk lying around and I tried a fresh install of Win XP. Wonder of Wonders, it works! The machine boots! But, I don't feel like reinstalling all my software and settings, I'd send the drive back to Newegg before I'd do THAT. OK, I tried the ghost image again and once again, blinking cursor, period.

OK. Must be a problem with the X32 and this HD. I remove the HD, and put it into my T42. I install a T42 ghost image on it to see if it will work (this is a different ghost image, made a week before, not the same file as what I'd been putting on the X32). After reimaging the drive now in the T42, I got-- you guessed it -- a blinking cursor.

What the F is going on here?

I decide to flash the new Lenovo firmware on the drive; after all, what do I have to lose? After doing it, the firmware has changed, but no dice, blinking cursor is all I got. I understand that people here have been flashing HD firmware because of the dreaded "2010" error present on T43s, but I figured, maybe it would help (it didn't).

At this point I'm about 45 seconds from tossing the drive out the window into the snow below. I'm about to remove the drive and give up. After all, about a day and a half has been wasted on this project and I have nothing to show for it. As I gather all the papers I'd printed out with those cryptic command lines for HD firmware flashing, I notice in the upper corner of one page a post by "martin_nv" of North Vancouver, Canada (an aside; Vancouver is my favorite city in N. America and I visit it for a week every year).

Martin writes in his post of Oct 20, 2006, about upgrading to a 120gb Fujitsu drive in his T43, that he'd used Ghost 2003 to put his old drive's image on the new drive and he got . . . . . "a cursor at the top left." Then he nonchalently tosses out this sentence, "So I booted into recovery mode using my XP CD and did a 'fixmbr', and then it booted. So far so good!"

I don't know anything about the "Recovery Console" in XP, other than that I remember it as the first option one is offered on installing XP over an existing installation. I know nothing of "fixmbr," except it sounds a lot like "fix the master boot record, you POS operating system!"

So, in a last act of desperation I booted up the X32 with the drive in place attached to a USB HD with a Windows XP CD in it. I got the option for the Recovery Console, chose it, and typed "fixmbr." I was asked which partition (or windows installation) I wanted to do this to, one being "mini-something or other" which I presumed to be the service partition, or "C:\windows." I chose the latter. After a dire warning I indicated this was in fact what I wanted to do, the system did it in about half a second, and now the system boots and it works like it used to!

Now that you have read or at least skimmed through my verbose post you may be wondering, what's the point, why post this? THE POINT is that when you put one of the new large HDs in one of these notebooks whose drive was imaged with a much smaller drive, somehow and for some reason, the Ghost image or the R&R image or whatever other software you may be using -- may put everything back on the drive that you want except that the files necessary for booting up are either put in the wrong place or aren't there at all -- I just don't know. This very simple restoration technique (assuming you have a Win XP disk) can save you a whole bunch of time and maybe prevent your sending a perfectly good hard drive back to the vendor when in fact the problem is some sort of hardware/software incompatibility that is easily remedied with "fixmbr."

[EDIT 12/22/2006: See Next Post: You may be better off using the Specific Thinkpad MBR Recovery Program]

If this spares even one person the aggravation I have experienced over the last day and a half, it will have been worth the effort to type this up.

Hope this helps.

ken

[Ken Fox]

After getting my new 100gb HD to boot up (see first post), I decided to deal with another problem; somewhere along the line I lost my service partition. It was definitely during the last 6 months because I used the service partition in April when I was in France and both my ethernet and wireless drivers got corrupted. If I had to guess, that file corruption was due to a download from our buddies at Lenovo through the Software Installer, but I digress.

In any event, I found the service partition (accessed at bootup through Blue Access IBM/now Thinkvantage Button or F11) to be invaluable as it allowed me to get back online through wired ethernet and to download new drivers which fixed the problem. There is a mini browser and email capability in the service partition as well.

I must have lost the service partition by accidentally only restoring the NTFS partition from a Ghost Image some months ago. I previously found that the service partition on both my T42 and my X32 is identical, so in this case I just stole a copy from the T42. First, I tried to use the product recovery CDs for the X31 which I had lying around, but they did not create the service partition for some reason.

Getting back to the point of this post: If your MBR becomes corrupted for any reason, but particularly because you upgraded drive size, and you are left with the blinking cursor rather than the windows screen, you could use "fixmbr" on the Windows installation disk as I advised in the earlier post. That will work, but I don't think it will give you access to your service partition as the Windows MBR is generic and knows nothing of the IBM service partition or how to get there.

SO: It turns out that Lenovo/IBM have a nifty little program you can download that gives you an authentic Thinkpad MBR, that knows of such things as service partitions. This comes in a bootable floppy or CD form, and you can download the files needed to make these here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-54483

With the help of this and the service partition, I now have a fully functional 100gb HTS721010G9At00, with all original features built into the laptop.

[rkawakami]

Ken,

The service partition repair diskette has been mentioned here a couple of times before. If you use the "Search" link at the top of the page and enter "service partition repair". you'll find a number of hits. One of the better ones is this:

F11 recovery partition missing after clone

[Ken Fox]

Ken,

The service partition repair diskette has been mentioned here a couple of times before. If you use the "Search" link at the top of the page and enter "service partition repair". you'll find a number of hits. One of the better ones is this:

F11 recovery partition missing after clone

Ray,

That thread is from a year ago and has a dead link to IBM, not Lenovo. It also refers to a diskette for "A22, T22, T23, & X2," which are somewhat ancient machines presumably running other operating systems than XP and perhaps with drives formatted to something other than NTFS.

If there is such a diskette for more "modern" series of Thinkpad laptops, I could not find it by diligent searching on the Lenovo support website, before and now after reading your post. I have seen threads here recently addressing the loss of the service partition but they refer to using the CDs that used to ship with these laptops but no longer do. In my case I used a set of those disks as a first try and for some reason, presumably because they just don't have it, the service partition was not installed and I had to improvise.

Bill Morrow addresses some of these issues in this post: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... ion+repair

Unfortunately, if you don't know what the symptoms of a corrupted boot sector are, this page isn't going to explain it to you. I didn't use Acronis software, but I got exactly the same result with both Rescue and Recovery as with Norton Ghost 2003, so there is something going on that I think has more to do with the drives themselves than the software used to clone them. I did read this page a few days ago but didn't find anything in it that I didn't know already (other than the boot sector issue which I didn't understand at the time). Also, it doesn't address using Rescue and Recovery to clone a hard drive, which is a logical use of that application if you can get it to work. I personally don't think that the service partition and or boot sector are necessarily lost due to user error. I think they are lost sometimes due to limitations of the software, its inability to adapt an image from one size of a drive to another. This software in most cases (e.g. Norton Ghost 2003) is just incredibly simple software and too much can't be expected of it.

In any event, the service partition issue was just an addendum to what I was posting about. What I'm addressing is a situation where neither Norton Ghost 2003 OR Rescue and Recovery v. 3.1 were capable of writing to a new, larger hard drive and producing a hard drive that WOULD BOOT. The point I was trying to make was that if this happens to you, it is a simple thing to fix. One can use the "fixmbr" command if one has a regular windows XP installation disk (per the other forum member's comment that I referenced in my post), however there is also the Lenovo/IBM program which is better because if you already do have a service partition, this MBR fixing disk will allow you to get into it. Bill addresses that issue in his post. Also, not everyone has a Windows XP installation disk, but nearly everyone can download a file to make a disk from the link I provided in my 2nd post.

Best,

[rkawakami]

That thread is from a year ago and has a dead link to IBM, not Lenovo.

Ah, yes... there is (was?) a problem with some of the current page redirects which can cause some "support has moved" error messages. I believe that there's a problem with one of the cookies being deposited (or not). Try just accessing this page:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... OME-LENOVO

and then see if the "dead" links become valid again. One other workaround I have at the moment is to take the document ID ("MIGR-xxxxx") and plug it into the Lenovo search box. I believe that the cookie in question expires at the end of the browsing session so you will have to re-access that page if you close your browser.

It also refers to a diskette for "A22, T22, T23, & X2," which are somewhat ancient machines presumably running other operating systems than XP and perhaps with drives formatted to something other than NTFS.

Possibly true, but all of my T23s at the moment are running either Win2K or WinXP.

I'm not sure what your problem with Ghost 2003 might be. I use the same program to clone my systems. However, I use a Ghost boot diskette and perform the image/clone outside of Windows. The target drive is mounted in an Ultrabay adapter and I use an external floppy drive via a port replicator. I've taken brand new drives from newegg.com and transferred the OS from a smaller drive to a larger one. As I did not have an original drive with a service partition until just recently, I never noticed any problems. The cloned drives always booted correctly. Windows also always recognizes the "new" drive and requests a re-boot, only for that first time. Only when I did a complete system install (creating the service partition) did I find out the problem with the inaccessible partition. That was easily solved by locating the repair diskette (searched the archives here to find the solution). I've never had a problem with my 600X and T23 systems. I suppose it might be possible with the newer systems that additional steps are needed (fixmbr) in some cases. I remember playing around with that utility back in the DOS 3.3 days

[Ken Fox]

I'm not sure what your problem with Ghost 2003 might be. I use the same program to clone my systems. However, I use a Ghost boot diskette and perform the image/clone outside of Windows. The target drive is mounted in an Ultrabay adapter and I use an external floppy drive via a port replicator. I've taken brand new drives from newegg.com and transferred the OS from a smaller drive to a larger one. As I did not have an original drive with a service partition until just recently, I never noticed any problems. The cloned drives always booted correctly. Windows also always recognizes the "new" drive and requests a re-boot, only for that first time. Only when I did a complete system install (creating the service partition) did I find out the problem with the inaccessible partition. That was easily solved by locating the repair diskette (searched the archives here to find the solution). I've never had a problem with my 600X and T23 systems. I suppose it might be possible with the newer systems that additional steps are needed (fixmbr) in some cases. I remember playing around with that utility back in the DOS 3.3 days

Hi Ray,

I use Ghost 2003 on a bootable floppy, in a dos environment. I suspect that is exactly what you are doing. Occasionally, although not in this case, I've used a bootable CD to accomplish the same thing (see below).

I've been using Norton Ghost for maybe a decade, although my interest and enthusiasm for it is on the wane. The newer versions, like 9 and 10, leave me cold with their copy protection and untrustworthyness. It's a utility program, and as a 1 program per 1 machine bloatware thing, it just doesn't wash and doesn't approach being worth what it would cost to use it that way.

As for ghost 2003, it is still useful but I have to be very careful what pieces of equipment I use with it. The program has great difficulty with some USB2 adapters and not others. I have a couple of SFF desktops that can only use it from a bootable CD, not from a floppy which they refuse to boot up to. I have to unplug all my USB drives or it refuses to boot up or fails to recognize them.

I find Ghost 2003 much more usable on a thinkpad because the USB ports or hubs in them, at least the two that I have, are recognized. I have done many many many disk ghost backups and clones; I'd bet several hundred over the last 10 years and probably 50 this year. I have helped friends of mine with a medical office to upgrade the old hard drives in their Dells last week using Ghost cloning.

What I experienced with migrating the contents of the older 7200rpm (60gig) drive to a new version 100gig is outside of my prior experience. I've had clones that did not work for a variety of reasons but this was always obvious during the cloning process and not when I mounted the disk. I've never had a corrupted boot sector from a Ghost clone.

What is bizarre is that I had the exact same result using Rescue and Recovery 3.1 (the current version) on the same drive pairs. And then, I tried to clone the same 60gig type of drive that is also in my T42, over to the new drive with ghost, and had exactly the same result. The latter case was cloning in a T42 using the ultrabay HD adapter and not a USB attached drive.

My point is that this is not Ghost -- there is an issue with cloning this 60 gig earlier version drive to the new 100g drive. There may be a general issue in cloning smaller drives to this new drive-- I don't know.

But, it is fixable, easily so that is good to know.

[GomJabbar]

There is an issue with Ghost, and the necessity of using the -IB switch. The web server appears to be down at the moment, but here is the link.

Partition does not boot after being restored with Norton Ghost - NetVista / ThinkCentre / ThinkPad General

[Ken Fox]

There is an issue with Ghost, and the necessity of using the -IB switch. The web server appears to be down at the moment, but here is the link.

Partition does not boot after being restored with Norton Ghost - NetVista / ThinkCentre / ThinkPad General

This is useful information. I might add, however, that I've imaged my T42 and X32 a gazillion times each, and not had this problem. When I had my T40, I imaged that as well and used ghost images to change HDs and restore THAT system and don't recall a problem with the MBR or the service partition (although I don't recall if my T40, an early one, had a service partition).

What is more, I had exactly the same problem with the MBR using a Rescue and Recovery 3.1 set on the new 100gig Hitachi drive destined for the X32.

Norton Ghost 2003 is a very finicky program; when it works, it works well, and when it doesn't, you want to jump out of the window. I believe that there MUST be an issue with Norton Ghost on some Thinkpad systems as detailed in the link you kindly provided. At the same time, I don't think that explains my experiences with this new 100gb HTS721010G9AT00 drive. Something else is going on in transferring imaged disk contents from a 7K60 to a 7K100 (100gb version) drive. Flaws in the Ghost 2003 program do not explain why an R & R restore had exactly the same issues.

Finally, although the provided link is useful, it may provide a solution requiring more effort than it is worth. I've not had a problem with the service partition not being imaged when I have imaged the whole drives (and you can certainly make a mistake by just imaging the Windows partition, but I'm saying excluding operator error). You can always check the image obtained to be sure it is composed of the two partitions; if not, repeat the ghosting. Given that, if you did image the whole drive including the service partition, I think it would be easier to just download the iso(s) for the IBM MBR repair utility, the link for which I gave in post #2. Using this, you should be able to repair whatever boot sector problems might crop up if and when you use the ghost image to restore or clone a drive.

[EDIT] Ghost PE (ghostpe.exe) is from versions of Ghost prior to Ghost 2003. If you read the Lenovo page linked to above, you can see it is in reference to ghostpe.exe imaged disks. If you have Ghost 2003 that you use on bootable floppies, I sincerely doubt that this document applies to you, as the file used on the Ghost 2003 bootable floppies is "ghost.exe

[Second EDIT] now I'm confused because in that Lenovo page they mention "Win PE," not "ghost pe." I apologize for the confusion. In any event, the page discusses the "WIN PE rescue and recovery partition," whatever that is. All I can say again is that when I have imaged the whole drives I have gotten both the Windows and the service partitions. In all other cases I have gotten the MBR as well, although in this particular case, going from a 7K60 (60gb drive) to a 100gb 7K100 drive, the MBR was corrupted using both Norton Ghost 2003 AND R & R 3.1

[Ken Fox]

There is an issue with Ghost, and the necessity of using the -IB switch. The web server appears to be down at the moment, but here is the link.

Partition does not boot after being restored with Norton Ghost - NetVista / ThinkCentre / ThinkPad General

I'm going to have to reverse myself; in fact, I think this was a part of the problem. I've used Ghost many times but most of the times I've used it on Thinkpads I've only actually restored the Windows partition, not the entire disk. The one time I did restore an entire Thinkpad disk (but omitted the -1b switch) led, I believe, to loss of the service partition on my X32 (which has since been restored). BUT, and this is where it gets a bit more interesting -- the disk (on that prior attempt) still was bootable and did not require MBR repair even though the specific IBM MBR must have been lost.

In the particular case that caused me to start this thread, the resultant disk was NOT bootable, at all, until the MBR was repaired with either the Windows disk or the IBM MBR repair diskette. This was true with cloned contents from both a T42 and an X32.

So, I"m still left with trying to understand why in transferring the contents of a 7K60 to a new 7K100, using a ghost image made of the entire 7K60 disk but without the -1b switch, the result was a nonbootable 7K100 that had both the service and Windows partitions but no functional MBR.

And, the fact that I had exactly the same result with Rescue and Recovery deepens the puzzle. The one possibility that would explain the failure of R & R to produce a bootable cloned disk would be if R & R 3.1 does not restore the MBR on a clone target disk, although that would make the program basically unusable for disk cloning except by a user familiar with MBR restoration.

[GomJabbar]

I believe the information below answers the question about the need for the -IB switch when using Ghost. Regarding your problem with Rescue and Recovery, I do not have enough details to hazard a guess. FTR, I have not done a RnR restore, so I have no first-hand experience with it. I only made a couple of backups with RnR until I decided it was too slow for my backup purposes.

When creating an image or copying disk to disk, the -IB switch (Image Boot) forces a sector-by-sector copy, and copies the entire boot track; not just the boot sector.

Use this switch when applications, such as some boot-time utilities, use the boot track to store information.

You cannot perform partition-to-partition or partition-to-image operations with the -IB switch.
Partition sizes cannot be altered when using the -IB switch.

Ghost - Alphabetical list of switches

[tarheel77]

I have a new T60 and I bought a slim bay adapter, put in a drive, GHOSTED it and it wouldn't boot. Followed the thread above to the lenovo site, downloaded the master boot record repair executable, made a diskette and that fixed it. The stock drive was an Hitachi 60 GB. The replacement was a Hitachi 5K160 (160GB) with the perpendicular recording technology. Seems pretty zippy compared to the 60 GB, although both are 5400K.