Max HD capacity - bios limitation?

[DaveDD]

Hello,
A question about hard drive capacity. I have a z61t (stats below) running very well. A few months ago I replace the original HD (60 GB I think), with a 250 GB Seagate. Use Apricorn's EZ Gig II to clone the orig to new HD - worked perfectly. But then, in order to make a backup HD that could in an emergency simply be swapped and replace the current one, I bought a 300 gig Seagate. Cloned the HD again, and although everything is readable when I attached the 300 gig HD via USB, it won't work as the actual HD. The system will not boot - I just get a blinking cursor (no error). I have recloned the drive twice, but it still does not work. Again, my 250 gig clone works perfectly.

I have read that some systems have Bios limitations to the size of a HD or the size of any single partition. (Both my HD have just two partitions - as did the original - the only difference is the main partition for the 300 gig is of course larger by about 40 gig.)

1) Does anyone know if there is a HD/partition maximum limit with the z61t?
2) Can you tell me how to check my Bios's limitation? (I couldn't find the info, but I didn't know where to look)
3) Has anyone heard of a partition being too big? If so, do you think making a third partition that is about 50 gig (with Acronis Disk Director for example) would solve the problem?
4) Do you think there may be some other problem I could look into?

Thanks for you help!
- Dave
z61t
Windows XP Home
2 GB memory
Bios 2.25

[RealBlackStuff]

There shouldn't be any limit on HD size.
SATA drives are available in 320GB, 500GB and larger, and should all work.
I suggest you try and boot from a Windows XP CD, and do a Repair using the FIXMBR and/or FIXBOOT program(s).

Is that 300GB HD recognized in another PC or laptop?

[DaveDD]

Hi,
Thanks for such a quick reply. I don't have another laptop to test the HD (though as I said I can read all the contents via USB). My z61t shipped without a Windows XP CD - and although I have "Rescue and Recovery" disks, I don't have the actual XP Home CD. I do have an XP PRO CD from another system - would I be able to use that to repair the boot record or are they different?
So you don't think making another partition would make any difference? (That seems easier to me than repairing Windows which, I assume, could change other things on the 300 gig system, right?)
Thanks,
- Dave

[Neil]

Cloning usually works better when you put the new, blank drive, inside the Thinkpad, and put the old drive in the USB enclosure. The other way around often gives the boot trouble you are having. Which way did you do it?

[DaveDD]

That's interesting. I cloned both new drives with the original in the laptop and the new connected via USB. As I said, the 250 gig clone works fine, but not the 300.
But since the drives will nevertheless be connected via USB, do you know why this should make a difference? Isn't one drive simply being copied to another?
- Dave

[Neil]

Sorry, I don't know the technical reasons why. I think it has something to do with the way the disk is initialized by the Thinkpad when in the drive bay. Someone else with more knowledge about it can probably give you a better answer, though.

[DaveDD]

Hi,
I decided to go the "clone again" route, and before reversing drives I made one more attempt (my third) with the new attached via USB (since that is how Apricorn says to do it). This time it worked!
Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.
- Dave

[LGJ]

I have had the same experience with cloning a 500 GB 5K500.B Travelstar (43N3420, 45N7720, 45N7011 HTS545050B9A300) in an R61i. I cloned the drive once, booting with the EZ Gig II CD, but the cloned drive would not boot. I cloned it a second time after booting to Windows, which they recommend, but when cloned successfully, it would still not boot. In both cases, the drive is cloned, and is accessible as a second drive, but will not boot. Even though the drive did not boot, it accessed R&R on the drive, and copied a previous version, but that would not boot either. Do you have any idea why your drive now boots? To clone your drive, did you boot with the EZ Gig II disc, or did you clone within Windows? Did you do anything differently the third time you cloned it, that might help me to clone mine so that it is bootable?

R61i, 8932-9XU, T5250 core 2 duo at 1.5 GHZ, 3 GB RAM, 15.4” display, and IEEE 1394 port, Windows XP Pro, SP2;
original BIOS, version 1.03 (70ET24WW), 28 June 2007.

[DaveDD]

Hi,
Not sure if this will help, but as far as I recall I only did one thing differently the third time. Using the EZ-gig II disc and the Apricorn adaptor via USB as before, the only difference is that I proceeded as if I were going to change the partition sizes but when I got to that part in the process I decided not to change anything and just continued. I can't imagine how that could have made a difference, but one never knows.
Good luck!
- Dave
P.S. Are you using the Apricorn adapter? I'm not sure, but think I may have forgotten to plug in the power jack when I tried the first time. The drive can still be powered by the USB port alone, but maybe it wasn't enough to work properly for the cloning process. This said, I'm pretty sure I plugged it in the second time, which still didn't work...

[LGJ]

Thanks for your reply.

In another posting on the forum, I found a reference to a comment on the Apricorn website, that agrees with Neil, to clone the new drive in the machine, using the old drive with the USB cable. But since Neil didn't have a reference, I was suspicious, and had not yet tried that. But it worked on my R61i, 8932-9XU, and the new drive now boots just fine. Apricorn has a 20-page procedure online for the use of the USB-SATA cable, but it didn't mention the exception with Lenovo, to put the old drive on the USB cable, and in fact, the procedure says the opposite. The Lenovo exception is located in this obscure question and answer.
http://www.apricorn.com/faqs.php?id=1023&family=f

Ref: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=47308 Thanks BeeJayEmm.

Incidentally, the cloning under Windows took 2.5 hours, but booting with the Apricorn CD, cloning took only one hour. Although using the new drive in the machine, I could not clone under Windows, and had to boot with the Apricorn CD anyway.

FYI only: I have an older Apricorn, USB enclosure for an IDE drive, that used a power adapter. But the Apricorn, USB-SATA cable that I just bought, has no power port. The cable works fine, but has no indicator to show the drive is in use.
http://www.apricorn.com/product_detail. ... mily&id=57