ThinkPad T40 Drive Cloning and Migration Problems

[Core Share]

"Missed by that much."

-- Don Adams, Maxwell Smart

Hello,

I have an IBM ThinkPad T40 (2373-12M) from 2003, a magnificent, noble and faithful beast, it has seen many years service.

It came with a 30 GB 2.5 inch PATA (IDE) hard drive.

It has four partitions (in addition to the hidden IBM recovery one) and all four are eking out existence on circa 200 MB each of free space.

Also the SMART data suggests I only have about a 100 days of good life left.

In any case, the dire data situation, prompted me to upgrade to a larger capacity 2.5 inch PATA (IDE) hard-drive, and the easiest one to source in Australia was a Samsung HM160C with a 160 GB capacity, which will do me fine.

Firstly I used a drive cloning program "FssDev Casper" to clone the original hard-drive, and it did that well - however... I had forgotten about the hidden recovery partition...

So when I put the new drive and booted, all I got was a black screen with a cursor in the top-right corner of the screen.

Reviewing the Casper documentation, it does not take into account hidden partitions.

And so I am back to square one.

I do not want to rebuild my operating system and applications, I want to migrate all the explicit partitions (C,D,E,F) and the hidden IBM recovery partition to the larger hard-drive, and be able to boot properly, and give the original hard-drive a well earned holiday.

Can anyone suggest how this can be done successfully?

Any reflection most gratefully apprised, thank you.

[RealBlackStuff]

Put the old drive in a USB HD enclosure (or a 2nd HD adapter in the Ultrabay instead of the CD/DVD).
Put the new drive in the HD drive bay, incl. the caddy and 4 screws.
Most popular on the forum is the Acronis True Image Home software, which can clone partition by partition (incl. hidden ones), or the whole HD in one go.
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/pr ... trueimage/
You can get a Free Trial for 30 days.

Whether you should keep the recovery partition, is debatable.
It contains a rather old version of Windows, with outdated drivers, and missing all sorts of M$ updates and Service Packs.
Also, when you restore, you lose THE WHOLE HARD DISK and all its partitions and contents (apart from the recovery partition).
In other words, it's obsolete. YMMV.

[Core Share]

@RealBlackStuff:

Thank you for the advice, I will experiment again on the weekend.

These two links provide reflection consistent with your strategy:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-pri ... d-p/311948

http://forum.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-Thi ... /m-p/35577

I shall report back!

Best regards,

Core Share

[Core Share]

@RBS: I finally bit the bullet and did the experiment and here is the report:

1. Putting the Original HD in an external USB HD enclosure.

2. Putting the replacement HD in the T40 instead.

3. Booted the machine in the Acronic True Image Home 2011 v14.0 Recovery Environment.

4. Chose the "Clone Entire Hard-drive" tool, with manual optioning. (There was no mention of hidden partitions)

5. Cloned the original onto the replacement drives.

6. Booted successfully!

7. Noted that the "Access IBM" no longer works as expected, but only gives a menU offering a) boot as normal b) F1 for BIOS, and a third option which I cannot recall.

So it would appear that the diagnostic and recovery partition is history and was not cloned.

Since this is still my main working machine and it really needed the HD upgrade, and now boots successfully, I am not too concerned at the loss.

It may well have been a case of PEBKAC with Acronis.

But I am a little sad to see the hidden partition go with pre-installation recovery enviroment and the IBM support environment,old faithful has really gone "bare-metal".

I have a x60s that will need a HD upgrade eventually, and I will no doubt be faced with the same dilemma and challenge.

Surely this problem of hard-drive migration, which would exist for all Thinkpad models and ranges, has been solved in the full generality?

For instance IBM/Lenovo Technical support must be able to do it - preserving both user and factory partitions?

[RealBlackStuff]

For those who cannot wean themselves off the recovery partitions, there are sets of Recovery CDs, either from Lenovo, or via our Marketforum.

[Core Share]

@RBS: There was no implicit criticism, I was just reporting from the field, of what my migration experience was like.

Supposing you had recovery CD's and you had a bare-metal drive you wanted to migrate to, could one "prep" it with the Recovery CD's to establish the "Access IBM" boot/recovery environment and then clone the visible partitions from the source/original drive over to the new one, and in doing so, preserve the "Access IBM" boot/recovery partition?

[GomJabbar]

You might have PARTIES on that drive. See if the following is any help. You probably have to disable the service partition in the BIOS before cloning.

http://groups.google.com/group/ibm.ibmp ... f946520409

[RealBlackStuff]

To answer your question: withe those Recovery CDs you can put back the Restore partition and restore Windows the way it left the factory.

[Core Share]

@GomJabbar: With the "Hitachi Feature Tool" you may have discovered the "Rosetta Stone"/"holy Grail" for a fully general ThinkPad solution to cloning a factory drive? - And a mighty entry in some ThinkPad FAQ.

http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

@RBS: So once you've created a "factory install" on a new disk with ThinkPad Recovery Media, then modify the hidden partition with the feature tool, so that it's not clobbered, then delete the factory C: drive, then clone the partitions from the source drive, then one may have successfully migrated from the target drive and have the new drive in a "factory configuration" state, with all the old data? (Resetting the hidden partition status with the feature tool afterwards.

I'd love to experiment, but I don't have the time for the foreseeable future, alas, I was doing an emergency migration mid-project.

Thanks to you both.

[Orclas]

You seem to be all set, but thought I'd share my way of working around the issue you mention.

I had roughly the same problem as you with wanting to clone my T40's HDD to an SSD, preferably including the hidden partition. After a few hours of failed trials and reading up, I decided not to take any risks of loosing the recovery partition and instead simply did a clean recovery install on the old HDD (including running all windows & driver updates etc) and then cloned the whole shaboom to the SSD as per the setup suggested by RBS.

This leaves me without a functional recovery partition on the SSD, but on the other hand I have a fresh and updated system "backup" which I can always revert to by cloning it again.

Your situation is of course a tad different with a dying drive (I did my drive change for noise reasons), but except for that it's a decent work around. Another work around is to do the same and then use a cloning tool which lets you clone HD/partition => img => HD/partition.

I myself used HDClone with a plain HD=>SSD job, the paid versions support the mentioned various HD/partition/img clone and restore combinations.