Re: Hard Drive Upgrade

Carl Farrington wrote:

"John" <johnpaulwatkins@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1157966444.504895.196810@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I am having difficulty upgrading my IBM R51 Thinkpad HDD. I used
TrueImage to clone the disk, including the FAT32 partition used for
rescue and recovery, and that seems to have worked. The problem comes
when swapping the new disk fir old, the machine will not boot and I
receive a "Operating System not found" error.

I have checked BIOS, and it does recognise the new disk. I have also
double checked the drive partitions to make sure the clone has worked
as requested, and that the right partition is active etc.

OS is XP. Old disk is 40GB Hitachi. New disk is 80GB Toshiba.

Any advice welcome, thanks.


I have had strange results with cloning laptop drives, quite often with TrueImage as well. The problem seems to arise when doing the cloning with a desktop computer, and then moving the drive back to the laptop. Odd as this sounds, it's as though the desktop machines seem to address the disk slightly differently to the laptops. In many cases I have been left with what appears to be an MBR or boot sector problem, and the only fix is to repartition and reformat from within the target machine. Odd.

Perhaps though, the problem in this instance is more to do with you trying to clone the HPA partition. You should really be backing up and restoring the HPA partition with the Phoenix tools, as per the IBM instruction document which details the procedure.


Carl,

I think I have an explanation for the "strange results" you are referring to. IMHO, and although nobody has been able to explain clearly to me the cause of the problem, it looks like Thinkpads has a different way of "addressing" a HD. I read something about it some time ago but I went over my head and could not make sense of it. I would be extremely grateful to anybody who could explain to me what is different with IBM addressing system. I believe that Compaq used to be different in this regard too, but this is water under the bridge today I guess ...

Until I bought a Thinkpad, I never ever had any problem with PartitionMagic copying boot partitions from one drive to another and using it. When I tried to do the same thing with a Thinkpad, it did not work. When I checked the partitions with PMagic, it came up with an error message saying the geometry of my HD was faulty, and the data was not accessible. Conversely, using PMagic on my Thinkpad created boot partitions that were deems faulty if checked from a standard desktop.

I looked for a workaround to this problem (I am used to Partition Magic and find it very clear in its menus and safe to use), but came up with the conclusion that I had to clone the whole (whole highlighted here) disk with TrueImage to get a bootable disk. Once this is done, partitions other than the boot partition can be changed and move with PMagic without a hitch.

Using TrueImage has worked for me nicely, with the proviso to be extremely careful when selecting the disks, using the Manual approach to clone the whole disk, directly and not through a file to be restored later.

I am curious to know where John, the OP, stands now.

Regards

--
John Doue
.

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