HD Clone issue w/ XP tablet - Service Partition @ End of HD

[davekung]

I'm in the process of upgrading my HD to bigger and faster ones.
The vista HD upgraded without any problem (Source in Tablet, Destination in USD HD dock)
Clone the old HD "as is" via Seagate discwizard and resize the Primary partition to take up unallocated spaces.
However, for my wife's XP HD, ther service partition is at the end of the drive instead of the beginning of the drive.
So I resize the destination partitions manually (retaining the same partition order)
I used a second PC to clone the hard drive. Source in USB enclosure, Destination HD in USB HD dock
When I swapped the hard drive, it failed to boot.
However, I can access service partition via thinkvantage button. (The old drvie is a 100GB Seagate and the new drive is a Seagate 7200.3 320GB HD)

I set the SATA Mode to compatibility in BIOS in both instance.

Any thoughts what I did incorrectly?

Thanks,


David

[K0LO]

David:

You didn't do anything wrong. Seagate DiskWizard is based on Acronis True Image version 10. One of the problems with version 10 is that it sometimes outsmarts itself. It attempts to avoid booting problems by shuffling around the entries in the partition table so that they agree with the value in C:\boot.ini, but this algorithm will sometimes fail when there is more than one OS partition on the disk.

Your other clone worked because you cloned "as-is", which will preserve the old partition table layout. The clone on your wife's PC required changes to the partition table because the partition sizes were adjusted.

Could you elaborate on "failed to boot"? What exactly does it do?
1. Blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the display
2. Produces an error message (if so, what is the error message?)
3. Starts to boot Windows and then hangs up on a blue background?

Probably all you need to do is to connect the disk to another PC and check the value in the boot.ini file in the XP partition:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT

If yours says "2" then try changing it with Notepad to "1", or vice-versa. The correct value would be determined by looking at the partition table to see which "slot" belongs to the XP partition (1 or 2).

[davekung]

Thank for the reply!

The screen went blank and hard drive stopped spinning after the Lenovo splash screen. Did not even get to the XP Logo screen

The discwizard actually messed up the source XP drive as well. I have to select "boot from Last Known Good configuration"

I'll try the true image Ver 11 tonight and report back to see if they fixed the issue.

Can you sugguest any tool to resize the system partition and move the service partition as I clone the drive "as is"

Did not see Vista Disk Management has the ability to move partition. I used Vista Disk Mgmt to rezise my Vista system partition. It was easy becuase the service partition is before the system partition.

Cheers,

David

[K0LO]

...The screen went blank and hard drive stopped spinning after the Lenovo splash screen. Did not even get to the XP Logo screen

OK; different issue. Your wife's laptop probably has the Lenovo 240-head geometry. You can run into problems if the "clonee" drive is not connected to its final destination while cloning.

...The discwizard actually messed up the source XP drive as well. I have to select "boot from Last Known Good configuration"

This was probably Windows that messed up the source drive. If Windows sees two drives with identical disk IDs it will change one of them.

I'll try the true image Ver 11 tonight and report back to see if they fixed the issue...Can you sugguest any tool to resize the system partition and move the service partition as I clone the drive "as is"

You can use TI 11 to accomplish this. I presume that you want to have two partitions; one large XP partition followed by the recovery partition, which should remain at the same size. Try this:

1. It's best to start with a blank target disk. Put the target disk in a USB enclosure and use TI 11 to wipe the disk, deleting all of its partitions.
2. Put the source disk back into your wife's ThinkPad and connect an external USB hard disk that has enough free space for a full-disk image. You'll need about 70% of the used space on the source disk for the image file.
3. Run TI 11 and create an image of the entire disk, saving it to the external USB disk. If TI 11 isn't installed on your wife's PC, boot the PC from the TI recovery CD to do this.
4. Remove the source disk from the ThinkPad and install the new, blank disk in its place.
5. Boot from the TI recovery CD set up the image restore in steps as follows:
5a. Start the recovery wizard and select the image file on your external USB disk as the source.
5b. Select the XP partition to restore. Select the new disk as the destination. Resize the partition to almost fill the disk, leaving enough room for the recovey partition at the end.
5c. When asked if you want to restore any more partitions, say yes and continue.
5d. Select the recovery partition from the image to be restored next. You don't need to resize it, but it won't hurt if you need to make it a little larger to fill the remaining space on the disk.
5e. Say yes to continue adding more partitions.
5e. As a final step, select MBR and Track 0.
5f. Start the restore process.
6. When done, reboot the PC from the new disk.

You could also do something like this with the clone function, but you have to be careful to remove the source disk before booting back into Windows or else Windows may make changes to one of the disks. With the image process there are fewer opportunities to risk changing the source disk. Also, you get as many opportunities to repeat the restore as you need.

[davekung]

The new hard drive finally was able to boot into Windows XP
TI is a pain, and so are all cloning software out there.
The only cloning option from TI home 2009 is as-is, automatic or manual.

As Mark mentioned in his post, select manual and resize partition screws up everything.

I took Mark's suggestion to backup the drive. However I use rescue and recovery instead of TI.

This what I did
1. delete partition on the target drive
1.1 backup system files using rescue and recovery
2 Clone the source drive using TI home 2009 using as-is (both system and service partition)
3. Went to sleep
4. The target drive was not able to boot into Windows XP when installed on my X61 Tablet.
5. Reboot and Press F11 to enter into Service partition (rescue and Recovery)
6. Restore system files.

Viola. The new drive boots into Win XP.

Now comes the partition moving and resizing.
1. I downloaded and installed a freeware program called EASEUS Partition Master home edition
http://www.partition-tool.com/download.htm
2. Move the service partition to the back end of the hard drive
3. Resize the system partition to take up all the remainder unallocated drive space.
Now my 320GB (nominal size) Seagate has a 292GB system partition and 5.83GB (orig size) service partition.

For me, the advantage of using Rescue & Recovery is that no DVD drive is needed, which will require the use of external DVD drive or ultrabase DVD drive for X series Thinkpads.

The biggest lesson for me is BACKUP!