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Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive? (Read 63805 times)
Rad
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Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Jul 21st, 2008 at 8:31pm
 
Hi.

My laptop currently has a 60-gig hard drive. It is partitioned into 3 parts (30 + 7 + 20).

I also have a 500-gig Seagate external USB 2.0 hard drive.

I have Ghost 12.

I have swapped out many desktop drives, but never a laptop drive.

Anybody done this?

The new drive is Western Digital 160-gigger.

I'd like to also make room on it for a Linux installation (Ubuntu?)

I'm thinking something like this:

C: 30 GB
D: Optical
Linux: 20 GB (not sure what file system will be best)
E: 50 GB
F: 50 GB (whatever is remaining)

all NTFS except Linux.

Back up Ghost 12 of C to external Segate
Swap out old for new
Partition
Restore
???
Does G12 have partitioning capabilities?

Should I repartition (with Partition Magic) AFTER restoring image of C (which contains PM)??

Am open to all ideas.

New drive should be here in a day or two.
 
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Brian
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #1 - Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:02pm
 
Rad,

Changing a laptop HD is easier than doing it in a desktop. You laptop manual will tell you which screw to undo.

I assume you already have an image of your C drive and backups of your data partitions. This is what I'd do...

Swap HDs
Partition the new HD with your PM boot CD
Delete the first partition so it's unallocated space
Boot from the Ghost 12 CD and restore your image to the unallocated space and choose "Resize restored drive" so that there will no unallocated space left over
Boot to WinXP and copy over your data backups

Done...


 
 
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Nigel Bree
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #2 - Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:23pm
 
Rad wrote on Jul 21st, 2008 at 8:31pm:
Anybody done this?

Yup, although never with the V2i toolchain. Pretty much the only question is whether the notebook is still using a "large"-type INT13 geometry for the hard disk instead of LBA; even nowadays you can't be sure about this.

Filesystems in USB enclosures are always treated as having LBA-type geometries, which is whydisk-to-disk type operations with the new drive temporarily held in a USB enclosure (before swapping it into the machine) often results in failing to boot with notebooks.

That's why for notebook drive replacements it's best to stage the transfer through backup images, like you were planning to do.

You should probably use ext2/3 (they are basically the same, ext3 just adds a metadata recovery logfile like the NTFS one) as your Linux filesystem. I also definitely recommend Ubuntu as your first Linux experience; in particular, it's much more likely to play well on notebook hardware out of the box, and the default installed package selection really is well thought out.
 
 
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #3 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 9:38am
 
Rad,

Have a look at this reply (the link &
quoted text
). I have a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop & was thinking of getting a new (higher capacity HDD)-tho' have not yet done so as I instead opted for a new one for desktop(500 GB SATA HD-more cost-effective/GB). It seems you have/will have a similar situation.
 

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Rad
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #4 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:04am
 
Brian wrote on Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:02pm:
Delete the first partition so it's unallocated space

it will let me delete the first after partitioning the whole drive?
normally, i would delete the first only after deleting all the later partitions.

Quote:
the only question is whether the notebook is still using a "large"-type INT13 geometry for the hard disk instead of LBA

the external is fat32. how do i find out about the internal? which is 2.5 years old. i looked in dev mgr, but saw nothing telling there.

Quote:
You should probably use ext2/3

i thot reiserfs was supposed to be the sh!t (v. cool).
 
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Rad
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #5 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:11am
 
 
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #6 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 4:14pm
 
Rad wrote on Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:04am:
it will let me delete the first after partitioning the whole drive?  

Sure. You could create your partitions by starting from the right hand end of the PM rectangle and omit creating the last partition but I prefer starting from the left end. More intuitive.
 
 
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Nigel Bree
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #7 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 6:48pm
 
Rad wrote on Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:04am:
the external is fat32. how do i find out about the internal? which is 2.5 years old. i looked in dev mgr, but saw nothing telling there.

LBA versus LARGE is a BIOS-level setting, and you'll need to enter the BIOS configuration screens to tell. Basically, it's not worth looking at. Staging the transfer through an image always works, and it's safer.

Rad wrote on Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:04am:
i thot reiserfs was supposed to be the sh!t (v. cool). 

Meh. I've seen better designs over the years (there's *lots* of academic research to draw on in filesystems).

By all means experiment with it yourself, and if it floats your boat, fine. But I'd do that later when you're more confident with UNIX generally (and don't need any tightropes, since nothing else has the toolset support ext2/3 has) and are going to be in a better position to evaluate the finer pros and cons of the different filesystems.
 
 
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #8 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 7:42pm
 
Thanks gents.

I created a Ghost 12 back-up image today on my external USB drive.

One thing .. I noticed my C_drive is *not* my first drive. About a year ago, when I started running low on space, I reformatted the D_drive, which held the emergency restore utility and back-up (~ 7 gigs) that came with the laptop.

Do you forsee that creating any problems?

Since the drive was "invisible" (I forget the file system used), I would expect all pertinent boot info/files to be contained on the C_drive. When trying to access the D_drive before I reformatted it to NTFS, it would give me a warning that said something like, "You don't want to be here. Go away."

I will attach a screenshot of computer management screen. See here:
 
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #9 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 7:54pm
 
One more thing .. do I need a Linux swap partition? If so, how big?
 
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #10 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 9:22pm
 
Rad,

That is certainly a "full" computer. Could you look at your boot.ini to see which partition is referenced as the OS. Although your OS is the second physical partition, it may not be the second primary partition in the partition table and you need to know whether to expect boot.ini problems with the restored image. The plan is to restore the image to the first partition.
 
 
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #11 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 9:37pm
 
Quote:
Staging the transfer through an image always works, and it's safer.

Nigel,

In the Acronis True Image forum a lot of new members report failure when cloning their laptop HDs using an external enclosure to hold the new HD. Many of these laptops are IBM, HP, Compaq brands which have 240 head CHS geometry. The suggestion is to "reverse" clone. Have the old HD in the enclosure and the new HD mounted internally where it's seen in its final geometry. TI can perform a clone from the boot CD. Ghost 12 can't perform a clone from the boot CD so the reverse clone technique isn't available.

 
 
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Rad
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #12 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:20pm
 
Brian wrote on Jul 22nd, 2008 at 9:22pm:
That is certainly a "full" computer.

I was kinda hopin' nobody would notice.  Embarrassed Data is oozing out of the drive's seams.

Here'e ye olde rad boot.ini: Code:
 [boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Partition 1. That means it sees the C_drive as the first partition, right? (Or is '0' first??)

Yeah, my plan is to install the system partition to the first partition on the new drive.

You think C drive being on 2nd partition on current drive will be no problem?

Is there a better migration-cloning tool than Ghost?
 
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Nigel Bree
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #13 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:26pm
 
Rad wrote on Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:20pm:
Is there a better migration-cloning tool than Ghost?

I don't think so, but then "Norton Ghost" isn't Ghost at all, it's V2i.
 
 
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Rad
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Re: Best way to upgrade to new laptop hard drive?
Reply #14 - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:30pm
 
Brian wrote on Jul 22nd, 2008 at 9:37pm:
Ghost 12 can't perform a clone from the boot CD

Is that an anti-piracy configuration?
 
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