Cloning new hard drive before opening new notebook.

For many years now I've wished I'd made an exact clone of my new notebook's hard drive before I went through the "new system" process. You know, when you first unboxing experience when the system is still virgin. On reason is that one year, with a new notebook, I started deleting unwanted programs and made a mistake and deleted the wrong files and horribly messed up the system. All I wanted was to return to the "good old days" when everything was a nice, fresh install. Also, I like to "recycle" my old notebooks by selling them on Ebay and I think it would be a selling point to have the hard drive back to it's "right from the factory" state. Here's what I want to know.

I'm expecting my new Thinkpad T60 in a week or so, can I remove the hard drive before starting up the system, install it in a external USB drive case and using either Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, make a clone of both the hidden partition and regular partition to another external usb drive?

I'd then pop the original drive back in the system and store away the clone for a later date.

Oh, and does anyone know how big a target drive I should get to hold both partitions? Thanks in advance.

 

You can simply use the bundled recovery cd, in most cases, to return your system to its pristine, straight from the factory state.

 

I have had some problems with both True Image and Ghosts when using USB hard drives. They restart your computer and boot in a dos like OS. The USB support is limited and it gave me alot of trouble. If you have a 2nd partition on the local drive tell it to put the image there first and then later copy it to USB.
The image doesnt need much space. Should be less then 5GB.

 

I should have mentioned that I want to go a step further back beyond that. I don't want to set up admin passwords, etc. Thanks.

 

I've used Acronis MigrateEasy and, more recently, TrueImage (which includes the MigrateEasy functionality) to clone a HDD onto a bigger one. The cloning works fine if the new HDD is larger than the old one. There may be difficulties when the HDD is nominally the same size or smaller than the old one.

I am less sure than creating an image and then restoring it onto a different HDD will work. Last time I tried it did not. I believe that the cloning operation has enough intelligence to alter the absolute HDD descriptor on the target drive, but restoring an image onto a different HDD can confuse Windows because the underlying HDD is different.

The normal cloning operation is to put the new HDD into a USB caddy, run the software with the old HDD in place, do the cloning and then put the new HDD into the computer and start it up. Windows will be ready to go as in the previous installation, all software and passwords will be present. The only possible problem is any software which has the HDD details built into its activation code. Such software may refuse to work until reactivated.

You will then still have the old HDD as a complete backup.

John

 

Cloning can be difficult, but a good backup image should be safe (they are slightly different if I understand). I have done similar with ghost, but I wouldn't worry about this for the initial image - it will be on the CD's that you get with the computer.

 

John Ratsey said "...The only possible problem is any software which has the HDD details built into its activation code. Such software may refuse to work until reactivated."

John, isn't that exactly the case with any MS OS? So, somebody must have figured a way around it...

Dave

 

If you're using Vista and use True Image to add a partition for the image, your MBR will probably get messed up, so make sure you have your Vista disk to do a recovery. The recovery and quick and easy.

I ended up using the partition because my external 2.5" needs more power than the USB can reliably provide, which means it would probably drop out in the middle of copying a 20 gig image out to it....not good.

 

I can't remember XP causing me any hassle when I cloned an existing installation on to a bigger HDD.

Vista, on the other hand, complains at the slightest hint of a hardware change. I think a RAM change is the only thing permitted by Vista without complaining. I had to reactivate it over the phone after changing the HD and it's now wanting reactivating again because I enabled AHCI in the BIOS.

John

 

I have problem with trying to image Z60t with serial ata drives. I go into the bios first and tell it to unhide the IBM recover partition and allow access to it. Then I use ghost to copy from original intenal drive to external USB enclosure. It all seem to work fine until you restart and get a blank black screen. Great work IBM...I have also tried HD Clone Pro with the same results.
Anybody have better luck. If all I can get is the working partition to work on the new drive minus the hiddent then that will work I guess. Any help would be great. Thanks