Upgrading Laptop Hard Drive - Disk Cloning?

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pdinc

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 19, 2006
Messages
413
Hey,

I have a Thinkpad X61 with a 120GB hard drive thats proving to be too small for my needs. I want to upgrade to a 250gb drive, but I have dual partitions for a XP/Vista dual boot. I've heard reports that Symantec Ghost doesnt work well with Vista, so which cloning software would be best for my needs?

PS: Im not sure if this is the right subforum, but it seemed to be the best one to post this question.
 
Check Device Manager, figure out what brand of drive exists in the laptop, go to that manufacturer's website, get their drive cloning/setup tool and use that. If that doesn't work (fat chance of that however), you can try the same thing with the hard drive that you're purchasing for the swap.
 
Will the X61 support a 250gb drive? my T60 didnt support over 80gb and my T61 doesnt support over 160gb.

Easiest thing (free too) is to make a BartPE CD with either DriveimageXML or clonezilla to make an image of your current drive, then pull that image back onto the new drive
 
My X61 came with a 120gb drive, and I know that the 160gb option exists for it as well. I might have to look to make sure about the 250 though. And more importantly, my main question was: Will I have to worry about vista compatibility issues? Or is that a moot point when cloning an entire disk?

edit: The X61 tablet *does* support upto 250gb hard disks, since this is the largest option available on the lenovo config page.
 
Doesn't support over 160GB? EH? What the hell does that mean, if I may ask... seems kinda nuts as I've never heard of a limitation on hard drive capacity for what, 10 years or more... since the days of drive overlays and whatnot. I cannot believe for one second that a modern laptop, especially ThinkPads, would have any technological limitation on the capacity of a hard drive you put in one. That just makes no sense whatsoever to me.

As for whether or not you can BUY one pre-installed, that's an entirely different idea... if that's the case and you want more capacity, get the smallest capacity when you buy it and save a few bucks, and order a huge one to replace that one once you get it.
 
I asked that because I put a 120gb into my T60 and the bios saw it as an 80gb, I forget which model of the T60 I had, maybe the bios was outdated, but I think I checked that at the time.
I now have the T61.
 
Almost sounds like lack of 48-bit LBA support within the T60's BIOS. Though it would seem like if that were the issue the laptop would be able to see ~137GB of HD space, not 80GB.
 
With laptops...also consider your physical cloning method. With desktop/tower PCs..we're used to stuffing in a 2nd hard drive via IDE or SATA...booting from CD..and cloning.

But with a laptop.that's not always an option.

We use Apricorns EZ Gig transfer kits..they come in choices of PCMCIA ==> IDE adapters, as well as USB2==> IDE or SATA interfaces.
 
Simple external drive casing nowadays for 2.5" drives works... there's some of those 2.5" IDE/SATA connectors for hooking up either type of drive... works over USB, does the same things (I think that poster above just mentioned one, actually). Just peeked at the post and yep, Apricorn is one of the companies that makes 'em...

I've got a normal 2.5" to 3.5" IDE and SATA adapter to actually attach laptop drives directly to my desktop's controllers, but I've also got the external cases for both types of interfaces as well.

"You can never have too many tools in your toolkit..."
 
dont forget...laptop sata connect right up to a desktop sata/power cables, easier to clone !
 
Joe Average said:
Doesn't support over 160GB? EH? What the hell does that mean, if I may ask... seems kinda nuts as I've never heard of a limitation on hard drive capacity for what, 10 years or more... since the days of drive overlays and whatnot. I cannot believe for one second that a modern laptop, especially ThinkPads, would have any technological limitation on the capacity of a hard drive you put in one. That just makes no sense whatsoever to me.
Click to expand...

It could also be an issue of the length of the drives - I've had a friend have issues fitting a 500gb laptop hard drive because it was longer than the chassis could accept. And while im not sure about this, its highly possible because the X60/X61 is one of lenovos smallest laptops - its doesnt even have an optical drive (But they got one in the X300 instead. Wtf.)

dbwillis said:
dont forget...laptop sata connect right up to a desktop sata/power cables, easier to clone !
Click to expand...

I didnt know about that! That would make life much much easier.

And Acronis, eh? That sounds like the solution to all my problems. Thanks!
 
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