laptop HD upgrade

[brettsinger]

Hi,
This is something I feel like I should know how to do but I'm ignoring my pride and posting the question.
I have an IBM Thinkpad T40 with a 40GB HD. I bought a Western Digital 120GB HD and want to transfer the operating system to it. To do this I bought Partition Magic. I copied the partition to the new drive (the 120GB drive is in an external case), then installed the 120GB drive into the Thinkpad. BUT it won't boot; the error message is "Operating System Not Found". The old 40GB drive still works.
Like I said, ditching pride in favor of getting this done.
Thanks,
Brett

 

[Freestone]

Place the 120GB back into the laptop, boot Partition Magic and ensure the partition on the new drive is not hidden and is set to Active.

 

[paparazi]

Hi Brett
Not what you want to hear Brett but if it were me I would have taken the oportunity and the benefit it brings, to clean install the operating system and the programs.
A clean install every 18-24months is what I consider to be a 'spring clean' and necessary for trouble free operation.
As you have an external caddy you have the benefit of being able to transfer saved files etc
Martin



On wings like angels whispers sweet
my heart it feels a broken beat
Touched soul and hurt lay wounded deep
Brown eyes are lost afar and sleep

 

[Nelviticus]

I agree with Martin that a clean start is sometimes a good think, but if you have a lot of apps installed then starting from scratch can be a real headache. Upgrading without re-installing can be done though.

When I upgraded my laptop's hard drive I used Norton Ghost, but Acronis TrueImage should do the job as well. These are both pretty cheap and are useful apps to have around anyway.

The first step is to partition the new drive (in its caddy) into at least two partitions, one for Windows and one for everything else.

Next do a full drive image backup of your old drive to the second partition of your new one. Back it up to a file rather than cloning the drive, as you're going to use it to restore your system rather than to boot from.

Then put your new drive in your laptop and boot from the Ghost or TrueImage recovery CD. Choose the option to restore a drive then navigate to the backup file you made earlier. You should be able to 'restore' it over the first (empty) partition, giving you a bootable drive that's a clone of your old one.

Assuming that works, then when Windows boots you might have to go into Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management and mark the second partition as visible.

That was with a fairly old version of Ghost; new versions might well have a disk upgrade wizard which will make things even easier.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[brettsinger]

hm, interesting. Thanks.
In terms of partitions, I'm thinking the following:
40GB NTFS
40GB FAT32
40GB FAT32

Do I need to do two NTFS partitions in order to do your method?

Re: reinstall, I'd like to but there are some apps that I need to use that will be a pain to reinstall. I want to run multiple OSes from the new larger drive, maybe I'll do an additional Windows install.

Thanks

 

[Nelviticus]

The partitions don't have to be NTFS for the method I used but there's no point in using FAT32 unless you have to, i.e. if you're installing Windows 98 for some reason. NTFS is much better all-round - if you want to back up to a FAT32 partition you'll probably need to split the backup into chunks as FAT32 doesn't allow files bigger than 4GB. That's not a real problem, but FAT32 is also slow and inefficient for partitions above 32GB - see this Wikipedia article.

One rather obvious word of warning - don't wipe your old drive until you're sure that your new one is working 100%!

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[brettsinger]

thanks, I appreciate the help, especially the tip about FAT32 and the 32GB limit (again, things I should know but either forgot or never actually knew at all!)
The FAT32 partitions are for a future 'nix installation and to enable easier sharing of data between different OSs (a Mac, a Linux box, etc).
Thanks again,
Brett

 

[Nelviticus]

Well in the olden days *nix had great trouble reading from (and especially writing to) NTFS partitions but as that Wikipedia article mentions, "full support for NTFS has become available in Linux and many other operating systems". That probably includes Mac too.

Nelviticus