X1C: Imaging a brand new X1C -- how best to? via Acronis? USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 flash drive? 32gb used or much less?

For a brand new X1C, may i ask what some pointers are might be relevant to imaging?

apparently, USB 3.0 flash drives will not work due both to Windows 7 as well as Acronis not recognizing USB 3.0 for a boot up drive (as USB 3.0 post dates Windows 7 and Acronis).

have y'all been successful with a 32gb USB 2.0 flash drive? any particular brand?
also: how much of your 32gb flash drive was consumed with a brand new image of the X1C please?

Thanks very much in advance.

 

It's pretty simple. The first problem you have is discovering which USB port to use for the external DVD drive so you can boot from DVD. After that, you need an external storage device on the other USB port.

I typically attach my external Sony DVD drive to the USB 3.0 port which never seems to have a problem. Afterall, those SS USB 3.0 ports are "supposed" to be USB 2.0 compatible.

I typically attach the external storage device to the USB 2.0 port. Speed isn't your primary concern. I have not used USB sticks for backup/recovery purposes. I usually use my 2TB external disks for image creation targets.

 

I imaged my X1C's hard drive using an Ubuntu live-CD on a cheapo off-brand thumb drive, using dd:

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /mnt/sda1/hda.img.gz

The image was written to a USB hard drive.

This compresses the image on the fly; it worked out to be around 24GB. (If you didn't compress it, dd would give you a 128GB file.)

 

Thors.Hammer:

when you said the first problem is discovering which USB port to use so one can boot from the dvd, what does that really mean?

are you trying to say that there is some quirk on the X1 Carbon (or Thinkpads) that causes one USB port to have priority, or some advantages, to be used as a boot drive so it is better to connect to THAT PARTICULAR port? i couldn't catch the gist of what you were implying or trying to say.

thx in advance for clarifying it.

 

No. I am saying I have not tested this process on the X1 Carbon. The process I described has been tested on every machine I've ever used and I seriously doubt any quirk would manifest with the Carbon.

There's just one other thing.

Make sure when you hit the power button the first time, you are prepared to go into the BIOS and look-over the settings. For ThinkPads this has historically meant hitting the F1 key when you see the Lenovo logo. I assume it is the same with the Carbon. When you get into the BIOS or UEFI settings, make sure the external DVD is in the appropriate boot position for the Startup devices.

Have fun.

 

Thx for the F1 tip.

i wonder why so few people have done this imaging thing?

i want to save the image on a usb 2.0 flash drive that's been formatted in FATS32. this seems less cumbersome than attaching an external DVD drive, etc.

do y'all like the idea of a bootable usb 2.0 drive?

 

I made a USB boot drive using acronis that I have on my desktop pc.

On the X1C it's "ENTER" to bring up the boot menu, then just select the USB drive to boot off of. I think I put mine into the usb drive on the right side. I had a usb hard drive plugged into the other usb port.

I then just made a backup of the X1C to the external hard drive and I copied over the swtools folder as well. so I had direct access to the driver files / software as well.

Then I did a universal restore of my desktop pc to the X1c and after that was done went through and uninstalled a couple of desktop hardware items and installed (stepping through the swtools folder) the stuff I wanted. Mainly System Update, Wireless Driver, Power Manager, Video Driver, OSD utilities. Then rebooted, ran system update and updated anything else I needed. I generally don't run too much Lenovo stuff so it was pretty simple.

As a side note; I thought the default lenovo config was horrible, way too much bloatware, I'd never keep that as my main config.