Cloning X61 To A New Hard Drive

[Ci3reR]

Hello All,

I am going to upgrade my X61's hard drive to a 500GB one.

How to clone the entire files in my old hard drive to the new one? Including Lenovo hidden partition/HPA.

I tried to browsed for information but still could not find the solution which includes cloning the hidden partition.

Is Acronis True Image Home 2012 able to handle this?

Thanks a lot for your help..!

[Tsunade_Hime]

Yes True Image can do this. There should be an option to resize the partitions so you don't end up with a whole bunch of leftover space as a separate partition (unless that is what you really want).

[Ci3reR]

Thanks Tsunade for your reply.

Do I actually have to do this?

Acronis & Ghost

Third party disk imaging utilities can also be used - refer to instructions provided with those products for detail.

If you plan to clone a ThinkPad drive, the target (new) drive must be inserted in the TP as primary drive, the source (old) drive can be in the ultrabay or an usb caddy using a cloning software running from cd. Note: When using Ghost you must set the IB switch in order to capture all the boot sectors.

I read it from Lenovo forum for T61p, the process should be similar though.

However, it's kinda complicated if I have to switch the hard drive to clone, especially X61 does not have internal CD writer. The topic elaboration is here.

[mariol90]

That is one of the ways to do it.

"IPnaSh wrote:

The easiest and quickest way to clone a disk is connecting both disk on a desktop computer, and start then the cloning process with any disk cloning tool."
that's how I do it, and i've never had a problem. Thinkpads are no different than any other laptop in that aspect, so I'm not sure why the other person said " Cloning the drive in another system is 99.9% doomed to failure". the failure is pretty much completely dependent on the OS. if the drive won't boot, usually a repair using a windows 7 OS disc fixes the issue.
if the special lenovo partitions are that picky, it's still worth a try if you have access to a computer where you can connect both hard drives.

I'm using a hard drive in my X61 tablet that has a windows 7 install which was cloned several times (using true image and driveimage XML), and was originally from a hp laptop.

[John Ratsey]

My SSD (cloned using Acronis) includes two hidden partitions, so Acronis can handle them. I always do my cloning using a bootable CD. Clone with the original disc still inside. Then once the process has finished shut the machine down and swap the HDD.

John

[Ci3reR]

Hi everyone, thanks a lot for your help!
I had my hard drive arrived just now, but I am still waiting for the case (still not come yet). I have a case which is being used for around 80GB.

If i take out the 120GB (the main one) into this case, would it be fit?
Then I will insert my 500GB to the laptop and do the cloning from bootable USB drive.

Do I have to have a licensed True Image to create a bootable drive? Or will the trial one work?