T60 Hardrive replacement

[tmfast]

Hello all,
Great forum. I can't believe I did not find out about this a long time ago.
I bought a T60 about a year ago, thought the 60gig would be enough. Only have 17 gig left, so I want to replace it.
I was looking at a HITACHI H450-6020, 200gig, 7200 rpm SATA-150. Can I clone the old to the new in a USB enclosure with the trial ancronis? Will the hidden partition clone also?
I have a lot of old E-mails, and other files I would like to keep as is.
I have never tried to flash hardrive firmware before. Would I have to do that? It does not sound like fun.
I have read a lot from this forum. This is my 1st post. Looking foward to any advise.

Thank you,

[pae77]

If you mean the Hitachi TravelStar 7K200 200GB 7200 16MB cache 2.5" Mobile SATA-150 hard drive, great choice.

The full version clones the hidden partition just fine. I assume the trial version will do the same. Other users have indicated you can use a USB enclosure to clone the laptop drive. I have always used the ultrabay slim hard drive adapter so can't vouch for the other method.

Only 2 things to watch out for. In acronis the disk cloning function is under utilities if I recall correctly. Anyway, if you use Acronis' automatic setting, Acronis will proportionally resize (grow) the hidden partition when cloning to a larger drive thereby wasting many megabytes of your nice new HD. So it is better to use the "manual" setting in Acronis which allows you to set the size of each partition yourself to maintain approximately the original size for the hidden partition. Then you just need to resize the other partition to use up all remaining available space. Sounds harder than it is. It is really pretty easy with that program.

The other thing to watch out for is after the cloning procedure is finished, do not reboot with both drives connected to the system for the first reboot. Thereafter, you can reboot with both drives connected.

[Crunch]

I agree. Good choice. I recently did the same thing, and I got myself the Ultrabay HDD bay. It is SATA, and I can't tell the difference between when my 100GB drive was in the main HD slot compared to being in the Ultrabay bay. I virtually never use my DVDRW anyway, so this may not be the best choice if you burn a lot of CD's and DVD's.

I put the 200GB in the main slot, and it works flawlessly, and is extremely fast! I had never had 2 HD's in one computer. I love this setup, and if you put your MAIN drive into the the "main" slot, so to speak, you can actually hot-swap the drive in the Ultrabay with the DVDRW/CDRW (whatever you have), if you need to burn something real quick.

Make sure to use the EasyEject utility and stop the hard drive first before you swap it out. Hope this helps.