Right Product? Restore doesn't work

I have a Lenovo R60 thinkpad which recently had the HD die. I have an image of the HD made using TI11 that was made shortly after getting all of the apps installed - so it's a nice image of a clean install.

The old HD which died was an 80 gig HD. I purchased a 320 HD from Lenovo as a replacment.

I've tried bringing that image onto the new 320 gig HD. The problem is that after I add the image to the new HD, the HD fails to be recognized by the laptop.

Am I using the wrong product? Does TI only work if restoring to the same HD from which the image was initially taken? Should I be using the TI Echo Workstation instead?

Any hope of salvaging my restore with a TI product or am I doomed to reinstall everything from scratch?

Thanks,
Tom

 

with laptops you need to do a reverse clone to get it to work. Example, you need to put the new drive in the laptop and then restore it. This will prevent "chs geometry" problems that are common with laptops. The reason that the laptop isn't recognizing the hard drive is because the "chs geometry" is not matching the one that certain laptops recognize as valid.

As long as your backup isn't corrupted you can restore it everytime. It doesn't matter if it's the same drive or a larger drive.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=209574

 

Hello Tommy_boy,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image 11 Home

If the issue still persists can you please clarify the error message you receive while booting? I would recommend you to checked BIOS boot properties, make sure that HDD is set as first boor device. Let us know the results.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev

 

How exactly did you "add" the image? You cannot simply copy the image over to the new drive. You have to use the bootable True Image Rescue CD (did you make one?), boot the laptop with it and use the Recovery feature. Is this what you did? You can use any drive, same size or larger.

 

Thanks everybody fo the responses.

I initially hooked my new HD to a PC I have and restored the image using True Image running from the PC. Then I popped the new HD into the R60 laptop. When I tried to boot I just ended up with a cursor at the top left and it wouldn't boot.

After reading the thread JonyJoe81 pointed out, I tried it this way: Put the new HD into the laptop, had the backup image on an external usb drive, booted the laptop from the acronis disk and did the restore that way. And it worked wonderfully!

I mistakenly thought that putting the image onto the new disk would be the same regardless of where it was done from. Apparently that is not the case. I'd be lying if I said I understand this - but that's OK as long as I know how to make it work!

Thanks for all of the help.

-Tom

 

That's good news.

And you would have been right for most computers.

The Lenovo is an exception, and you have to restore to the drive in the notebook. As you said, now that you know your system, you know how to recover if it's needed in the future.