Who has successfully cloned (imaged) an IBM Thinkpad hard drive? (model A31)

This is so much more difficult than it should be.

I have a Thinkpad A31 (p4 1.8, 1 gig ram, XP Pro) with a hard drive that is dying, and I have a replacement Hitachi 40 gb to replace the OEM Hitachi 40 gb drive that came from the factory. I'd like to get the old drive imaged over to the new drive so I don't need to spend hours reinstalling all my crap. Here's what I've tried so far:

1. Took the hard drive out of the laptop, put it on a 2.5 to 3.5" IDE adapter, and did the same with the new drive. I used a copy of Acronis TrueImage to image. They imaged successfully, but when the new drive is installed in the laptop and the laptop boots from it, there is nothing but a blank screen and a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner.

2. I tried this same technique with Powerquest DriveImage. Same results

3. I have tried creating an image to a seperate hard drive, then restoring that image to the new hard drive and putting that drive back in the laptop. Same results.

4. Creating an image directly from the laptop to a network computer, then putting the new drive in the laptop and restoring that image. Same results.

5. Using a USB drivedock to directly copy from one drive to the other while on the laptop. Same results.

I've run out of ideas. This is so simple on every other computer I've ever used it on. I'm aware that IBM does some different partitioning, creating a restore partition that I believe is 1299mb, but that's about as much as I know about it and I suspect this is the cause of my problems.

If anyone has any other things to try I would greatly appreciate hearing them.

Maybe TrueImage and DriveImage are not going to work with the IBMs and I need to try Ghost.. I'm not sure about that just yet since I don't have a copy of Ghost but if I need to I will buy it.

Thanks in advance.

Unless the old drive and new drive have identical geometry, imaging does not work well. Take the drive out of the laptop. Follow the steps in your point 1 except copy the entire contents of the notebook drive to an empty folder on the desktop machine. Make sure you copy all of the hidden system files. Do not use imaging software. Then replace the notebook drive with the new drive. Copy the contents of the desktop folder to the new drive.

I've only used Ghost 2003 (or one of the older versions) and a USB hard drive to image Sony/Toshiba laptops, worked fine between identical models (not identical hard drives) but I've not tried an IBM laptop - sounds like there is something funny with the IBM laptop as you suspect rather than the imaging software.

John

IBM laptop drives have a few "special" security features. I don't know if those are implemented in an eeprom on the circuit board or on the disk.

Imaging software makes track-to-track and/or sector copies so if the drive geometry is quite different a image can easily fail.

Well I was able to get it working successfully, so hopefully this thread helps anyone who runs into a similar problem.

This is how I got it working using Acronis TrueImage - www.acronis.com

1) Take the old hard drive out and put it on another machine that has TrueImage installed.
2) Make a full disk image using TrueImage.
3) Put the new drive in the laptop
4) Boot the laptop off the TrueImage bootable CD
5) Configure your network settings in TrueImage so you can browse to the computer where the image you made resides.
6) Restore the image to the new hard drive in the laptop.

It worked perfectly and as you can see by the other steps I've taken, this looks like the only scenario to make this work with an IBM Thinkpad.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I bet other imaging software would work too if you followed the same basic procedure. It seems like the image has to go "past" the Thinkpad's bios and onto the drive with it in the laptop in order for it to work.. I'm still curious to know exactly what goes on with these Thinkpad partitions.

perhaps a clue ?

This is NOT your ibm model - it's about a "ThinkPad G41"

from Installing Debian on a ThinkPad G41

Quote:

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IBM does not provide the rescue/recovery CD set with this model so I suggest before anything else that you immediately boot into Windows and create the set if you think you will ever want to re-image the drive. You could always order the set from IBM for $45. The set from IBM consists of a "Rescue and Recovery" CD plus 6 "Product Recovery" CD's which contain the actual image that gets written to the hard drive.

After creating the recovery CD set I recommend going into the BIOS and setting the "IBM Predesktop Area" in the BIOS under "Security" to "Disabled". This enables you to remove the “PreDesktop Environment” area, which is the second partition and takes over 3 GB of disk space. The Predesktop Environment is not very useful unless you want to have the feature of being able to re-image your disk and re-install Windows from scratch. If you're really concerned that you will somehow badly screw up your Windows environment - if you ever use it :-) - you can always create restore points without wasting precious disk space on the Predesktop Environment.

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See, I read about unhiding that Predesktop area on the hard drive, but I looked in every single place in the bios for the option to Unhide it (looked in Security first) and did not see it. Perhaps a bios update is in order for that option to be there.

Thanks for the link.

Hey ua... Ghost and nearly all other modern cloning tools only resort to track or sector copies if they don't recognize the file system. (HERE is a Symantec support page confirming this.) If the cloning tool can mount the file system, they work at the file level and can easily copy drives of different sizes and geometries. Ghost and DriveImage have supported FATxx & NTFS for years and I'd imagine the same would go for Acronis TrueImage. Most recent cloning tools also natively support most *nix partition types like ext2 & ext3.

If there's a proprietary partition type on the drive, that could possibly throw a cloning tool for a loop, but it's uncommon. I'd be surprised if that's the case since ThinkPads are typically business-friendly models and IBM/Lenovo knows they need to accommodate their customers who routinely clone disks.

This thread doesn't really shed a lot of light on what exactly is going on, but it is where I found out how to make it work successfully: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=468737

It is on Acronis' official message board.

I had something similar happen to me when I was copying an old IBM Deathstar HD (1999 vintage, though) over to a new WD 80 GB. Got the cursor error and ended up redoing the copy again.

At that time, I thought that somehow the boot sectors didn't get copied the first time or something odd like that. Because it was clear the disk was copied (i.e. I booted the computer from the Deathstar, which was only starting to click nastily, and browsed the WD, and everything seemed in order).