Cloning laptop drive with XP (IBM Thinkpad)

Hi all,

I'm trying to clone my laptop's hard drive to a larger hard drive. I have two laptop/IDE converters and cloned the drives in my desktop computer, which completed with no errors. The drive has a main 35gb partition and a hidden 2gb IBM service partition. Now, putting the new drive in my laptop and letting it boot simply gives me an endlessly flashing cursor after the IBM splash screen. The new drive shows up on the desktop computer though, and I can access all its files without problem. I tried running fixboot and fixmbr, but that didn't help (in fact, I think the computer doesn't see the service partition now, because the "Press F11 for IBM recovery service" or whatever option no longer shows on the splash screen).

Any help would be appreciated. I spent a long time trying to get this working this weekend, and you'd think it'd be a really simple operation....

- James

 

Read this thread:

Laptop Cloning Problems

 

I will be cloning my IBM Thinkpad G40 over the weekend. This system has IBM's hidden recovery partition. From the research that I have done to make a successful clone you must first go into the BIOS and unhide the recovery partition. Since I will be going from a 40G HDD (4200 RPM) to an 80G HDD (5400 RPM) and there is no sense in making the recovery partition proportionally larger I will be setting partition sizes manually.

So the process will be someting like this:
1. Clean and defrag the 40G drive
2. reboot, Go into the BIOS and unhide the recovery partition
3. perform the clone
4. install the 80G HDD into the G40 and reboot
5. if successful, go back into the BIOS and hide the recovery partition

I'd post back with results

John