I have an IBM Thinkpad T42 and I'm trying to upgrade the 40GB hard drive with a 120GB drive. The data must be an exact copy, with windows on one partition, so I've tried to image the original drive using Ghost 10 and Self-Image.
If I use Ghost with the options "Copy MBR" and "Resize drive to fill unallocated space" once I put the newly imaged drive into the laptop, it sits at a black screen with a blinking cursor.
If I use Self-Image to make an exact copy, the drive boots up just fine, but the partition on the new hard drive is only 33GB for windows and 4GB for the protected IBM recovery area. That leaves the rest of the drive as unallocated space. I would like this to be one big partition so I've tried using a number of partition programs to resize the partition to take up the rest of the unallocated space, but whenever I do this I'm back to the black screen with blinking cursor. I've tried booting up into recovery console and using fixboot and fixmbr with no luck.
Is there any way to image an IBM hard drive onto a new, larger, hard drive and allowing it to use all unallocated space without reinstalling Windows?
Thanks
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Gparted can resize most types of partitions, so do it the way that works and resize the partition.
Or make a new partition in the unallocated space and use it as a dedicated data storage partition, not a bad idea at all; if your systems goes bang, you can reinstall without having to shuffle all your data. A current backup is of course a must under any circumstances.
/RID
Thanks for the info. The problem I'm having with it is that IBM puts a recovery partition at the end of the drive. When I copy the image to the larger drive, that drive now has the recovery partition in between the primary partition at the front of the drive and the unallocated space near the end of the drive. If it's moved or the primary partition is resized (with any of the tools I've used so far), the computer refuses to boot and sits at a black screen with a blinking cursor.
Norton Ghost is good tool, and depending on what version you have you should NOT have problem to clone small drive to larger drive (use disk to disk copy). But my experience, Norton ghost does not work well on IBM / Lenovo system somehow, instead of Bootit-Ng will be righter and better tool for it.
If you like Norton Ghost, try make image again, clone disk to disk, do not assign drive letter, copy MBR, and set active drive.
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by: rindiPosted on 2007-10-23 at 12:08:32ID: 20133577
Try using bootit-ng, with it you can copy your partitions to the new disk (or also make images), then you can use the same program to resize and and move your partitions on the new disk to suite your purposes.
http://terabyteunlimited.c