Clone T60 100GB Drive w/ LogiCube Gadget

[Andy]

Hi Folks,

I'm feeling a bit frustrated after six failed attempts to clone my Vista T60's original 100GB to a new 200GB drive. The new drive is a Seagate Momentus 7200.2. The original drive contains a hidden Rescue & Recovery partition and I think I'm not copying and/or configuring this partition correctly.

My company owns a LogiCube drive cloner which has a number of options. For most computers, you can just connect the old drive and the new drive, push a button, and in half an hour or so you're up and running. It even extends partitions automatically if you want it to. It can mirror partitions or use what it calls its "clever clone" mode to adjust the new partition to fit available space on the new drive.

While the LogiCube device recognizes the two partitions on my old drive and says it has cloned them, the new drive won't boot.

One setting which I think I might need to tweak is CHS Translation: options are LBA, Large or "Extended CHS", LBA-1, LBA-2, Large-1 and Large-2. LogiCube support suggests one of the Large settings.

The device also has a "Master Manager" mode which I suspect is where the trick to making my new drive bootable lies. This mode lets me create multiple master partitions on the drive.

If anyone has experience with this device or can recommend a simpler way to clone my old drive so I can finish the upgrade, I'd appreciate any advice. BTW I do own an Ultrabay adapter for a second hard drive, so if an in-place clone method is the way to go, I may have what I need for that.

Thanks for any help,

Andy

[Brad]

Andy,

I would suggest Acronis True Image in conjuction with your second hard drive adapter and a external USB CD. Or a external USB hard drive enclosure.

A fully functional trial version of Acronis can be downloaded.

I would install the software. Then create bootable media. Normally this is a CD. I have it booting from a Sandisk USB thumbdrive and I use the second hard drive adapter where I have my backup drive. Getting this thumbdrive to work took a while so I won't get into that here.

I would install your target drive in your T60p and place your source drive in your adapter.

Boot from the CD and click clone.

Less than an hour later you should be able to remove the source drive replace it with your optical drive and then boot from your new upgraded drive.

Of course any re-registration of certain programs is par for the course.

Let us know how you do.

Brad

[Andy]

Andy,

I would suggest Acronis True Image in conjuction with your second hard drive adapter and a external USB CD. Or a external USB hard drive enclosure.

A fully functional trial version of Acronis can be downloaded.

I would install the software. Then create bootable media. Normally this is a CD. I have it booting from a Sandisk USB thumbdrive and I use the second hard drive adapter where I have my backup drive. Getting this thumbdrive to work took a while so I won't get into that here.

I would install your target drive in your T60p and place your source drive in your adapter.

Boot from the CD and click clone.

Less than an hour later you should be able to remove the source drive replace it with your optical drive and then boot from your new upgraded drive.

Of course any re-registration of certain programs is par for the course.

Let us know how you do.

Brad

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately one bit turned out to be incorrect -- or maybe I downloaded the wrong version. I downloaded and installed Acronis True Image Home, made the boot CD, and installed the two drives as you suggested. Then I went through the process of setting the two partition sizes manually after the automatic clone option wanted to increase the R&R partition's size proportionally to the new drive size, which seemed like a waste of 5GB.

Finally I had everything set the way I thought I wanted it and clicked "Next". At that point True Image informed me that the trial download version could not proceed. I think the R&R partition is what defeated it.

So now I'm back to the drawing board. I may give R&R a try, having found a spare 100GB drive which I can use to make a new complete R&R backup onto.

This whole process is really a pain. I guess most users just reinstall Windows, but I find that to be even more painful and avoid it like the plague.

Thanks anyway,

Andy

[Brad]

Sorry for your trouble. I have the full version and I have heard the trial version works. I apologize for leading you in the wrong direction.

Since you have a Seagate drive you can download their cloning software here which is a rebranded version of Acronis. This will be fully functional as long as there is one Seagate drive in your system.

Brad

[richk]

I had a bad experience with a T61 Vista HDD and Acronis this week. I tried to clone a 100GB drive to a different 100 GB drive and It left BOTH drives unbootable. I was able to get by the problem by putting in a retail Vista disk and doing a repair, but for a while, I was very unhappy.

[Andy]

Sorry for your trouble. I have the full version and I have heard the trial version works. I apologize for leading you in the wrong direction.

Since you have a Seagate drive you can download their cloning software here which is a rebranded version of Acronis. This will be fully functional as long as there is one Seagate drive in your system.

Brad

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the pointer, I'm downloading the Seagate utility now. I'm a software developer myself and find it doubly frustrating that upgrading my hard drive should be so extremely difficult.

I've just tried two more clone operations with the Logicube gadget, using settings they recommended, with still no results beyond a flashing cursor at the top of my screen. I guess the MBR is set up incorrectly but I'm not sure how to proceed to straighten it out.

Meanwhile, we'll see how the Seagate program works for me.

Thanks again,

Andy

[Andy]

Sorry for your trouble. I have the full version and I have heard the trial version works. I apologize for leading you in the wrong direction.

Since you have a Seagate drive you can download their cloning software here which is a rebranded version of Acronis. This will be fully functional as long as there is one Seagate drive in your system.

Brad

Hi Brad,

Many thanks, the free Seagate DiscWizard program, re-branded from Acronis, did just what I needed, and at the world's favorite price. I ended up going through the cloning process with it twice. The first time I chose "as is" as the safest possible procedure and achieved a bootable drive. I'd planned to use Vista's disk manager to extend my new C: drive to fill up the new unallocated space, but discovered that the tool can't do that with a bootable partition, even when that partition is not the current boot partition.

No matter, I went back to DiscWizard, this time manually adjusting my partitions to leave the service partition at its original 5.129GB, more or less, and fill up the rest of the new drive with my expanded C: partition. One hour later, plus a few miscellaneous reboots, and I'm back in business.

I'll try to remember to stick with Seagate drives for future upgrades, just for the useful free utility.

Thanks again,

Andy

[Brad]

Great to hear.

Have fun with the new larger faster drive.

Brad

[Andy]

Great to hear.

Have fun with the new larger faster drive.

Brad

Hi Brad,

Thanks, I'm defragmenting it now. Just wondering though, is the Seagate 7200.2 (model ST9200420AS) faster as well as larger than the 7200.1 (ST910021AS)? Of course, just having adequate free space again will make the system a lot faster, but if the drive is itself faster, that's an unexpected bonus.

The first time I opened "Computer" after booting to the new drive with the large partition, it showed exactly 100GB free -- from which you will deduce that the old drive had only around 8GB free. Not much elbow room these days....

Andy

[Brad]

I know the Hitachi 7K200 has a larger cache of 16mb compared to the 100gb drive which was only 8mb. If the Seagate has a 16mb cache then it should be faster. You could compare the specs on the manufacturers website. So Hitachi 7K100 100gb to Hitachi 7K200 there would be a difference. Sometimes depending on what you are doing this difference may not be noticable. Of course you will notice the doubling of you hard drive space whether it is faster or not.

Brad

[Andy]

I know the Hitachi 7K200 has a larger cache of 16mb compared to the 100gb drive which was only 8mb. If the Seagate has a 16mb cache then it should be faster. You could compare the specs on the manufacturers website. So Hitachi 7K100 100gb to Hitachi 7K200 there would be a difference. Sometimes depending on what you are doing this difference may not be noticable. Of course you will notice the doubling of you hard drive space whether it is faster or not.

Brad

That's the difference. Of course I was comparing 200GB drives with other 200GB drives when I ordered my new one. The ST9200420AS has 16MB cache compared with 8MB for the 100GB drive it replaced. The new drive's latency is a smidge shorter, 4.17 vs 4.2ms, but it's hard to see that making a perceptible difference.

Thanks again for your advice,

Andy