Need help cloning HD!

I have a Lenovo T60 with OEM 80 GB HD that is simply full. I am a noob, so please be patient with me!

My cousin cloned/ghosted a 320 GB 7200 rpm Seagate Momentus HD for me in November 2008. Turns out that it's a bad HD (failed the SMART test). Before I knew it was bad, I spent a bunch, a big bunch of $$$, having a tech come over and load drivers etc. I can and will return the Seagate HD.

In the meantime, I decided that I could keep the value of the work done by the tech if I cloned the bad Seagate before sending it in for a new one, so I bought a 320 gb 7200 rpm WD Scorpio Black from the local Best Buy.

This is what I did to try to clone the new WD HD:
- install Seagate in the HD bay of lappie (it runs, but is a little bit noisy)
- put new WD HD in an USB enclosure, plug into USB port
- use free software Disc Wizard from Seagate (a version of Acronis?) to copy. I made a CD of the software and that was of course in the CD drive.
- 30 minutes later, the 3 copy/partition processes were done.
- I spot checked the contents of the WD via Windows Explorer, and the contents were the same as the Seagate.
- remove Seagate from lappie, install WD in lappie.
- turn on.....nothing on screen but a flashing cursor line

What did I do wrong? Or what else needs to be done?

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!

 

30 minutes to clone the HDD is quite quick, unless you had filled only a small part of the 320GB. I normally leave my disk clones running overnight.

Vista or XP? Vista changed the boot info and it took the cloning software a little time to catch up. Maybe DiskWizard is not up-to-date.

You could try the trial version of Casper. If my memory is correct, it does not support partition resizing, but you don't need to do that.

John

 

HI John,
thanks for the quick reply.

I think at most only 80 gb is used, as the OEM HD was only 80 gb and that was used to clone to the (bad) Seagate.

Lenovo has a partition for the ThinkVantage recovery stuff, so I think I want to keep that.

Since the new WD HD has the image on it, should I erase it first (and if so, how?) and then try out the free Caspar?

Thanks!!!

 

You may not want to hear this, but its often practically impossible to clone thinkpad harddrives due to the hidden partition. I spend weeks trying to clone 100GB->500GB and while I did manage to copy the data it was never possible for me to boot.

Sometimes this is caused by Vista, which refuses to have two C drives exist at once, and re-names one, causing it to be useless until you remove the main drive and manually change Vista's settings (which is a pain in and of itself).

Other times the hidden parition seems to cause problems. Of what I remember people were claiming that it had fixed addressing for some parts and when it was cloned it often got moved by a very small amount, but still any shift was enough to cripple it.

Basiclly, its time for a fresh install.

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For you specifically, if you filled the 80GB then 30 minutes is a bit quicker then I would expect, but only by 10 minutes or so. You might want to try a second time.

Also, why did you need a tech to load drivers? If you download the Thinkvantage System Update it will download all the drivers for you, and walk you through installing them. If you can clone a harddrive, you update your own drivers.

 

Aha! My cousin cloned the original OEM to the Seagate in November. In Dec, the new Seagate froze, and I needed a tech to unfreeze it. This first tech did a recovery from the built-in ThinkVantage. I didn't know how to do any of that. The aha! is from AuroraAlpha's post - that the cloned HD gets crippled. Maybe it's just a coincidence that the new HD (the Seagate) was also a bad, failing HD!

Since the HD had been restored to an earlier point, the wireless printer and other stuff I can't remember were no longer on the HD. I am just too much of a newbie and had too little time due to work projects, so I just hired someone to come do it for me.

What I hate is spending the money on an "expert", and then it's not fixed!!!

Thanks. Now I don't know what to do.....

 

download the last Acronis backup software, it works very good and does not require making of a bootable CD like previous versions ..

I cloned my ~130GB partition overnight as it took more than 3 hours and I quit waiting for it and just went to bed. Next mourning it was all done

 

30minutes * 60seconds = 1800 seconds
81920MB(80GB) / 1800seconds = 45.5MB/s - so that's nothing spectacular really 30minutes seems very reasonable.