Acronis clone - disaster - both drives fail to boot!

[vikingboy]

I have a X61T with Seagate ST910021AS-(S1) hard disk - it has been painfully slow recently, even after upgrading memory to 3GB running Vista 32bit.

i decided to purchase an Intel 80GB SSD drive and migrate my Vista install to it. Everything looked simple and I followed the guide here http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=27721

I connected the SSD with a USB -> Sata adapter with external power supply to my X61T

I used Acronis v10 software to perfrom the clone operation. I selected the source drive, and the destination drive.
The machine rebooted, and performed the clone operation.
When completed I pressed any key to reboot.
As the bios screen was appearing I shut the laptop down by pressing the power button.

I transferred the SSD into the X61 and disconnected the original drive. The system failed to boot.
I reinstalled the original Seagtae hard disk and the system still refuses to boot! UGH!!!!!

I see a bios boot screen saying it cannot find any operating system on any drives.

I tried to reinstall the MBR as indictaed in the bottom of the above FAQ but still no joy.

thanks in adv for any ideas
Ian

PS the original drive is around 90GB with 60Gb used, the Intel drive is 80Gb total - could this be the problem?

[vikingboy]

problem partly fixed - at least the original drive boots now......

Ill try re cloning this weekend when I have some more time.....

[K0LO]

vikingboy:

With most ThinkPad models you need to do a "reverse clone" because of the nonstandard 240-head BIOS disk geometry. Install the new disk in the laptop and connect the old disk externally via a USB adapter. Boot from the Acronis recovery CD and clone from external to internal. Disconnect the old drive before first boot.

[richk]

I had the same problem, but I had a retail Vista disk around. You can boot from the Vista CD and do a "repair". It fixes up the boot record so it works.

[Bert09]

I've upgraded the drive in my X60 several times using the Apricorn EZ Gig II Cloning utility (supposedly the same as Acronis TrueImage) and have never had to perform the "reverse clone" method as described by k0lo.

vikingboy:

With most ThinkPad models you need to do a "reverse clone" because of the nonstandard 240-head BIOS disk geometry. Install the new disk in the laptop and connect the old disk externally via a USB adapter. Boot from the Acronis recovery CD and clone from external to internal. Disconnect the old drive before first boot.

[mpcook]

vikingboy:

With most ThinkPad models you need to do a "reverse clone" because of the nonstandard 240-head BIOS disk geometry. Install the new disk in the laptop and connect the old disk externally via a USB adapter. Boot from the Acronis recovery CD and clone from external to internal. Disconnect the old drive before first boot.

I've just cloned several T43 drives, one to a former T23 drive, one to a different T43 drive, one to a new blank drive, all were cloned with the new drive in the external enclosure, and all are working fine. I have had to do the reverse clone for X31, X32 cloning; not sure why.

Mike

[SHSH]

why isnt Lenovo simply fixing this drive geometry issue? Problems over and over - Lenovo seems to handle things here very differently compared to other manufacturers. Why is it?

[carbon_unit]

Thinkpads have pretty much always read the drive geometry different. I doubt they are going to change it.

[SHSH]

makes absolutely no sense to me

[K0LO]

I can't put my finger on the article that explained this choice, but it had something to do with optimizing the available disk space back in the DOS days. Today it makes no sense whatsoever. Most of the rest of the world uses 255-head BIOS geometry for their disks. Lenovo and Compaq are two notable exceptions.

[SHSH]

just curious: why are harddisks set up in lenovo notebooks working well in other systems? The other way round doesnt seem to cause any problems...

[bkahler]

Why would the cloning work with some systems and not with others as in mpcook's case? They are all 240 geometries ??