Having quite a bit of difficulties cloning my new HD

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pakman · #1 Post by **pakman** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 12:23 am

Not too long ago, I purchased a Western Digital Scorpio 160GB HD. I successfully cloned my old HD onto the new one, and everything was working great except for this very intermittent "tick" noise. I did some research on it and came to the conclusion that it wasn't technically a defective drive. WD is aware of the tick sound in some Scorpio drives, so they came out with a fix for it, the catch is it can only be installed from a floppy disk. Who even has floppy drives anymore? I had no way of installing it. I tried speaking with WD's customer support, but got so frustrated from the lack of support I decided to buy a Seagate Momentus 160GB.

Here now begins most of my pain. I attempted the same exact process of cloning my HD using Acronis TI 11, but during boot, I got some error saying the partition has changed or whatever. So I tried again, changing nothing, and it went through the entire process. After installing the new HD, I booted and simply got a blinking dash after the IBM splash page. So then I tried cloning my old 40GB HD onto the new Seagate HD, and then got the error about the partition changing again.

I decided to just try a fresh partition on the new HD in hopes that I could use the IBM restore CDs I made awhile ago. I formatted the drive, installed it, and tried to get into the BIOS to boot from CD, but instead I got a missing operating system error. It's like it didn't even attempt to go into the BIOS. Now I am just at a loss at what to do. Could my new drive be defective? Could I really have this kind of luck to run into two bad drives? Is this a user error? I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable about laptops, so this is killing me. Help would be greatly appreciated!

pakman · #2 Post by **pakman** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 12:28 am

I also failed to mention, I tried Norton Ghost as well, got the same blinking dash.

#3 Post by **Johan** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 2:23 am

You may try se the thread T42 blinking cursor issue and the links pointed to therein - your problem sounds related...

In the case of using Ghost, did you remember to use the "-ib" switch? See e.g. Thinkpad Won't Boot After Using Norton Ghost or Partition does not boot after being restored with Norton Ghost etc.

pakman wrote:Not too long ago, I purchased a Western Digital Scorpio 160GB HD. I successfully cloned my old HD onto the new one, and everything was working great except for this very intermittent "tick" noise. I did some research on it and came to the conclusion that it wasn't technically a defective drive. WD is aware of the tick sound in some Scorpio drives, so they came out with a fix for it, the catch is it can only be installed from a floppy disk.

Would you kindly provide a link to the Western Digital cure for their HDD clicking (ticking) noise? Thanks!

Johan

Brad · #4 Post by **Brad** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 2:47 am

Sorry to hear of your trouble.

There is much discussion on this forum of this exact problem.

I have never been able to solve the blinking cursor problem. Some have suggested Microsoft utilites as well as other boot fixes. Sorry to say that none have worked for me and I have tried many.

What I can suggest is when you are cloning from the WD (source) drive to the Seagate (target) drive the source drive should be the external drive and the target drive should be installed in your ThinkPad as the primary drive in the ThinkPad's hard drive bay (not to be confused with a drive installed in the second hard drive adapter). This method is the only method that for me has resulted in a successful clone 100% of the time.

Brad

pakman · #5 Post by **pakman** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 9:57 am

Johan wrote:You may try se the thread T42 blinking cursor issue and the links pointed to therein - your problem sounds related...

In the case of using Ghost, did you remember to use the "-ib" switch? See e.g. Thinkpad Won't Boot After Using Norton Ghost or Partition does not boot after being restored with Norton Ghost etc.

pakman wrote:Not too long ago, I purchased a Western Digital Scorpio 160GB HD. I successfully cloned my old HD onto the new one, and everything was working great except for this very intermittent "tick" noise. I did some research on it and came to the conclusion that it wasn't technically a defective drive. WD is aware of the tick sound in some Scorpio drives, so they came out with a fix for it, the catch is it can only be installed from a floppy disk.
Would you kindly provide a link to the Western Digital cure for their HDD clicking (ticking) noise? Thanks!

Johan

Western Digital Knowledge Base

Moderator edit: Shortened URL to prevent horizontal scrolling

pakman · #6 Post by **pakman** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 10:32 am

Brad wrote:Sorry to hear of your trouble.

There is much discussion on this forum of this exact problem.

I have never been able to solve the blinking cursor problem. Some have suggested Microsoft utilites as well as other boot fixes. Sorry to say that none have worked for me and I have tried many.

What I can suggest is when you are cloning from the WD (source) drive to the Seagate (target) drive the source drive should be the external drive and the target drive should be installed in your ThinkPad as the primary drive in the ThinkPad's hard drive bay (not to be confused with a drive installed in the second hard drive adapter). This method is the only method that for me has resulted in a successful clone 100% of the time.

Brad

How do you run a cloning program if the target drive is the primary drive?

Brad · #7 Post by **Brad** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 10:56 am

What I do is start the Acronis Rescue Media from the CD or a USB flash drive.

I have also never been successful cloning a drive while running Windows.

Start Windows and then Acronis and create the Rescue Media.

Brad

rush242 · #8 Post by **rush242** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 11:28 am

pakman wrote:
Johan wrote: Would you kindly provide a link to the Western Digital cure for their HDD clicking (ticking) noise? Thanks!

Johan

And does anyone have a way to do this without the floppy drive? That does seem really nuts.

Tim M · #9 Post by **Tim M** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 4:48 pm

Johan wrote:You may try se the thread T42 blinking cursor issue and the links pointed to therein - your problem sounds related...

In the case of using Ghost, did you remember to use the "-ib" switch? See e.g. Thinkpad Won't Boot After Using Norton Ghost or Partition does not boot after being restored with Norton Ghost etc.

pakman wrote:Not too long ago, I purchased a Western Digital Scorpio 160GB HD. I successfully cloned my old HD onto the new one, and everything was working great except for this very intermittent "tick" noise. I did some research on it and came to the conclusion that it wasn't technically a defective drive. WD is aware of the tick sound in some Scorpio drives, so they came out with a fix for it, the catch is it can only be installed from a floppy disk.
Would you kindly provide a link to the Western Digital cure for their HDD clicking (ticking) noise? Thanks!

Johan

Here is another thread that was helpful to me when I had the same problem: T41 HD cloning w/Acronis: no luck, PITA.

pakman · #10 Post by **pakman** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 6:45 pm

Brad wrote:What I do is start the Acronis Rescue Media from the CD or a USB flash drive.

I have also never been successful cloning a drive while running Windows.

Start Windows and then Acronis and create the Rescue Media.

Brad

This worked! Thanks!

Brad · #11 Post by **Brad** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 10:03 pm

Great to hear.

You are welcome.

Brad

Having quite a bit of difficulties cloning my new HD

Having quite a bit of difficulties cloning my new HD

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