How to Clone HDD to include hidden rescue partition

[daniellwu]

I'm upgrading my HDD and is looking to clone my existing Thinkpad T400 HDD to the new drive. I want to make sure that the hidden rescue partition gets copied over as well.

I'm looking into using Clonezilla to do the job (it's free and open source!). When you use clonezilla, do you have to choose "savedisk" in the options, which does a sector to sector whole disk copy if I understand it correctly? Or can you choose "saveparts" to clone the hidden rescue partition + your normal data partition, and skip the empty space?



Is there any voodoo I need to do to the BIOS so that clonezilla can read the hidden rescue partition during the cloning process?

[xxPaulCPxx]

I'm trying to clone my disk with Acronis 2009 right now too. For myself, I either get a "Partition has Changed" error, or it goes all the way though (including copying all the partitions) to my USB based external drive enclosure, but then only the S: system partition shown on the USB drive. Disk Management shows that nothing else happened to the drive, no other partitions are present, but it does show the reset of the capacity as unallocated space.

I looked at the "How to clone your drive" writeup, but that only sems to work if you've not using the rescue partition. Acronis online docs don't seem to have a way of copying the HPA, other than getting rid of it. Another writeup here talks about the HPA, but I'm a little lost in it.

Anyone have a simple an easy way to clone a small drive to a big drive?

[tdawg5480]

Hey I just did this tonight without a hitch. im using my swapped drive now and my original 160gb is in a safe place.

Use Acronis 2009 and follow this page and you will be fine will take about a hr or so to clone i had 74gb data on 160 drive moved to a 320gb drive.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=27721

note in acronis select utilities then clone drive
click on manual mode
select source and destination drives follow a few more prompts
when you get to move method choose manual then do not change anything on the next screen just click next and continue on. acronis will restart your thinkpad do its thing and in a hr or so depending on cloning size will reboot swap drives and your set to go...hope it helps

[xxPaulCPxx]

Yep, that's exactly what I did too... except it didn't work. Either I got Partition Information Changed message or it goes through the entire thing, but nothing appears at the end but the service partition on the new drive.

I'm on my new drive now, but only because I built the rescue DVD's, swapped drives, and rebuilt the image on the new drive. Acronis did me no favors this time.

I also started from the 160, but moved to a seagate 500GB 7200. Now vista only crawls!

[tdawg5480]

weird everything is there for me could it be that you have a different version of acronis? either that or its a hdd problem.......have you tried changing compatibility mode in bios? maybe worth a shot then re clone..........boggles my mind

[xxPaulCPxx]

Well, I doubt is a HD prob as I'm using it right now... and it was the latest download of Acronis 2009. I use that product all the time to upgrade peoples hard drives too!

[GatorHawk]

No experience w/ Acronis so can't comment on it.

Using Clonezilla, I used the 'save entire drive' option and it also saved the restore partition and MBR to an external USB. Not sure if this option did a full sector copy or not, I don't believe so as I could see it counting down only the Data parts of the main partition.

I also chose the option for maximum file compression. I didn't do any drive swapping, but only restored the original HD from the external USB after wiping/loading on other OS's. It did restore successfully each time. I did not have to do any BIOS adjustments.

[GatorHawk]

Just did a Clonezilla imaging.

I am using the latest version of Clonezilla and the screen is slightly different from yours, I think.

In the Select Mode screen, I chose "SAVE LOCAL DISK AS AN IMAGE"

This assumes imaging the internal HD to an external USB HD, all of the partitions (including restore partition) and the MBR.