New HDD in laptop - can't see old external drive

Just wonder if I'm going mad here?

I got a brand new unformatted HDD and put it in my laptop, and put the old HDD into a USB enclosure and booted the laptop using the Acronis recovery disk (the supplied installation disk).

When it boots, I selected the option including USB, but then none of the operations will work as it says it can't see any drives.


I swapped the drives around and ran TI from within Windows and cloning from the old drive, now back in the laptop to the new drive in the USB enclosure, worked fine.

So why not first time - does USB not work well from the recovery CD?

(In case it matters, I'm still using TI9).

 

It depends on the chipset the enclosure uses. Not all can be seen by True Image. A workaround is to use the BartPE cd that has the True Image plug-in.
When you booted from the TI cd, try the Safe Mode - sometimes that works even though it says to use Full to see usb devices.

 

What is your laptop? Does it have a SATA hard drive? Most new laptops are now SATA, and TI 9 is weak on SATA support for the Recovery CD which runs Linux. It looks as though your USB chipset is also not supported.

Did you ever boot this laptop from the Recovery CD before?

As DwnNdrty said, a BartPE disk will use Windows drivers and has a better chance of seeing SATA and USB drives.

You could also download and try the trial version of TI 11 which allows you to create a Recovery CD that you could test. If it works with your drives, you have the option of ugrading.

 

Thanks for responses.

Machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 running XP Pro.

Did a bit more work on this and it became apparent that the issue (or at least the thing that is stopping me moving forwards) is that the external USB SATA enclosure isn't spinning up the original Hitachi 5400RPM model 5K160 drive.

Yet if I put the repalcement Hitachi 7200RPM 7K200 into the enclosure, it works fine.

I'm baffled really - I've cloned the drives with the new one in the enclosure and the old one in the laptop so they're identical and both boot in the T61 fine. Yet put the 5400RPM drive into the enclosure an it just won't spin up. Repeat the process with the faster drive and it works just fine!
I tried external power etc to the enclosure, but it make no difference.

Maybe there's something wierd going with the "Lenovo'd" original drive that is stopping if from spinning up? I've asked that question on Bill Morrow's ThinkPads.com forum.

This somewhat messes up my emergency recovery proceedure (which I maintained on my T43) of having a recently cloned drive always available to slide in in the case of HDD failure.

 

Sorry to reply to my own post, but the people on the ThinkPad forum were as baffled as I am.

So today I've ordered up an UltraBay SATA adaptor, so that I can put the drive into the ThinkPad's ultrabay. I'll be astonished if that doesn't work, so it seems likely that there's some kind of wierd issue with the USB enclosure that I chose.

 

Another update:

The UltraBay adaptor turned up and works perfectly, of course.

Going back to the enclosure, I picked up a 5V 2.5A (so way more amps than needed) power supply today. The polarity is correct and the LED lights up on the enclosure (with no USB lead) so I know it's connected. I tried 2 different USB leads but the result is just the same - the drive won't spin up.

Therefore there must be some wierd incompatibility between the Hitachi 7K160 and the enclosure.

 

Rory,

Nice detective work. Hardware incompatabilities like this that shouldn't happen are hard to pin down. You nailed this one.