T43p cloning problem, SATA to PATA

[fredstev]

Well, here's a little problem I can't quite figure out how to deal with. I have a T43p (2668 h8u) with the original 60 Gb drive still in it. Running Win 7 home premium. It still works well, but I would like to increase the capacity. I just purchased a Fujitsu mhv2100ah 100 Gb PATA drive. This drive should not throw the 2010 error. I also have a ultrabay slim adapter that uses SATA drives. It works well, I've been using a Hitachi Travelstar 100 Gb drive in it for increased storage. I use Acronis Trueimage Ver. 11 for backups.

Here's my question: I want to clone my original 60 Gb drive onto the Fujitsu drive that I just purchased. Both of these drives are PATA. Is there any way with the existing equipment I have to do this? I was thinking of cloning from the 60 Gb drive presently in my T43p to the SATA drive in the Ultrabay, shutting down the system, putting the new Fujitsu in the laptop and the ultrabay containing the cloned copy in, changing the boot order so the I boot from the ultrabay, than cloning back to the Fujitsu. Sounds dicey to me.

I hate to buy a usb PATA adapter just for this last venture with PATA drives. Ideas, anyone?

[dsvochak]

Assuming you can both boot and run TI from the ultrabay drive, I’d use a slightly different procedure:

1) create a complete back up of the original 60g drive on the ultrabay drive
2) install the new drive
3) boot from the ultrabay drive
4) restore the backup to the new drive
5) boot from the new drive and use disk management to expand the partition (restoring the backup with create a 60g partition).

If you can’t run TI from the ultrabay drive, you’ll need TI bootable rescue media to do the restore. TI lets you create the rescue media on a flash drive, but I’ve never been able to create one that boots.

[fredstev]

Assuming you can both boot and run TI from the ultrabay drive, I’d use a slightly different procedure:

1) create a complete back up of the original 60g drive on the ultrabay drive
2) install the new drive
3) boot from the ultrabay drive
4) restore the backup to the new drive
5) boot from the new drive and use disk management to expand the partition (restoring the backup with create a 60g partition).

If you can’t run TI from the ultrabay drive, you’ll need TI bootable rescue media to do the restore. TI lets you create the rescue media on a flash drive, but I’ve never been able to create one that boots.

I thought of doing this, but chickened out because I was unsure that I'd end up with a bootable drive, with MBR intact.

What worked for me was:

1. Cloning the original 60 Gb PATA drive to an extra 100 GB SATA drive that was in the Ultrabay.

2. Removing the original drive from the laptop and replacing it with the new 100 Gb Fujitsu PATA drive.

3. Changing the boot order so the laptop booted from the Ultrabay. (F12 command)

4. Using Acronis Trueimage that was now on the ultrabay to clone the drive in the Ultrabay onto the new Fujitsu installed in the laptop.

I only had one minor issue, the Fujitsu drive does, in fact, throw the 2010 error. My first attempt at cloning resulted in Acronis complaining that "Partition information had changed" when the 2010 error came up, and it aborted. What I did was go into BIOS and change from "pause" to "continue" for handling the error. This allowed Trueimage to continue through its reboot with no keystrokes on my part. This was successful.

I'll have to do some studying on getting rid of the 2010 error with this new Fujitsu drive, but I'm pretty happy right now with the increased storage.

[fredstev]

Well, I haven't had much luck shaking the 2010 error after installing this fujitsu mhv2100ah drive. I've done some reading, and evidently these drives may or may not have the correct IBM firmware on them. I'm not about to roll back my bios, which seems to be the most common fix. Has anyone had any luck doing a firmware update on this particular drive?

[Harryc]

My experience with the larger Fujitsu mhx21xxah drives in a T43 is that some work without throwing a 2010 error and some do not. For those that do throw the error I have been unable to find a fix, so if you are successful the information you'd provide would be appreciated. I can tell you that I recently bought a mhv2120ah from EBay and it worked without error...expensive (but a nice drive) though.
http://cgi.ebay.com/120GB-MHV2120AH-FUJ ... 0084269767

[scr71822]

I've cloned from PATA to SATA and back again without a problem.

Your cloning software should support cloning to an image as well. Then just restore the image ot the new drive. Of course you'll need a seperate boot drive or floppy.