ThinkPad HDD Upgrade

Hey everybody, still trying to upgrade my bro's thinkpad. (RAM is in the mail..). so now its the HDD.

For some reason my bro is 110% adamant about keeping the hidden recovery partition, and thus his reluctance to upgrade from a 60GB 4200RPM, to a 120GB 5400RPM. ...i know, i know!

So if i get a new HDD, how do i get an exact image of the original drive including the hidden partition so he can still use that Access IBM button thing?

Is Acronis able to image the whole thing?

i just cant believe its so hard to part with an old slow HDD just because of that recovery partition!

TIA!

Merry Christmas everybody! happy holidays!

 

Norton Ghost is another option.

 

If you get a new hard drive, I would strongly suggest a fresh installation. If you burn the recovery dvd's ...goto the start menu, thinkvantage, create recovery media....

Use these DVD's to reinstall windows and the hidden partition will automatically be created on the new HD

 

might have to settle for making a disk image.
can't find that create recovery media option in windows. He doesnt have the thinkvantage folder, but he does have the Access IBM folder which is supposed to contain the program to make the recovery as per the IBM help.

he's on WinXP btw, does that make a difference of where to find the prog?

his thinkpad is at least 3 years old...during the Pentium M era.

 

If you are running Vista, Vista Complete PC backup is really great for this. It will copy the recovery partition as well as the OS partition and you can put in the new disk, boot the vista DVD and write out the old disk contents. I do this from Dual layered DVDs.

Vista is a very complete OS you don't have to download pieces here and there to support it.

 

if this is the case, I would use norton ghost then. I am not too sure where the program would be in XP, but I would assume that it would be in more or less the same spot. Run norton ghost, make the drive image and then perform a recovery install from the hidden partition.

 

Acronis works, just in case you want to go that route. I upgraded my T60's 7200RPM 100 GB Seagate 7200.1 to a Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 7200 RPM 200 GB without any problems.

 

seems like i might need to go with Acronis.
I looked everywhere for that media creator program and didn't find it. seems it would be much easier to just have the DVDs and go, since they're supposed to create the hidden partition too!

Anybody know the .exe filename of the program? I want to do a search for it.

So Acronis makes an image of the whole disk in one go? I don't need to do anything special?

 

Exactly the same and no problems

 

anybody provide me with the .exe filename of the media creator? trying to do a search on the computer to see if its there. seems better to have recovery disks.

tia