Anyone ever try to image a Thinkpad?

[Entity]

I just got an R32 (great laptop; I love it) and decided to upgrade the HD. Normally for upgrades I would just put in the new HD and install XP, but for this I was just hoping to ghost the drive (using Ghost 2003) and put it onto the new 40gb Travelstar I got. I tried this tonight, but with no luck; I'm guessing it has to do with IBM's "RapidRestore" or something along those lines. Does anyone know how I can image this to get it working? Or will I have to reinstall everything? They don't give you a custom CD, so reinstalling kinda sucks; no CD key for Windows (luckily I have a license I'm not using), as well as a bunch of driver crap.

Any ideas?

Rob

 

[Relayer]

The CD key is on the bottom on a sticker.

Did you make a CD of the image and try to restore it to the new hard drive and that didn't work? What kind of error did you get. Did you create an image of the drive or partition?

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: Relayer
The CD key is on the bottom on a sticker.

Did you make a CD of the image and try to restore it to the new hard drive and that didn't work? What kind of error did you get. Did you create an image of the drive or partition?

I tried to image it going from HD -> Desktop HD (image copy) -> new HD.

I finally gave up & installed a new copy of XP, copying over the old \Drivers & \IBMTools directories. Everything is spiffy now.

Rob

 

[jschuk]

I experienced the same thing when I was trying to backup a customer's HDD before messing with the software. I believe the rapidrestore is the culprit. I am pretty sure I tried a sector-to-sector copy too, but that will generate a large image file if it does work. IBM's restore CD's have the ability to write a new bootsector to the HDD, so I think if you imaged it and then used the CD (which service centers can get) to write a new bootsector you will be fine. After reading your message again I see that you are trying to copy your disk. You might want to try the "image all" option in Ghost, but that may not utilize the full HDD space of the new HDD.

 

[AMCRambler]

All the new IBM pcs come with a service partition on the drive now instead of a restore cd. When you boot them they will say something like press F11 for Windows Restore, that wil reload the OS from that service partition so basically you already have an image on there. You might have wiped this out when you reloaded XP though. If that is the case you'll have to get a cd from IBM to get that setup back. Of course you might very well have wanted to wipe it out since that service partition as they call it, eats up a good 2gb of your total hard drive space. As for imaging, where I work we use Norton Ghost for imaging and dump the images via the network card to a storage pc. It works well and restoring the image usually takes about 20 minutes. So if you've got a desktop sitting around with 2-3gb to spare, dump the base image onto it. The newer versions of ghost even let you break up the image into any size chunks so you can burn it if you want too. Ok I'm gonna shut up now.

 

[JZilla]

You can download the rapid restore and the rest of the software you are missing (including drivers) from IBM.

 

[aircooled]

It's been a while since I imaged a thinkpad (A21 series I think). At the time ghost would not detect the network card, so I ghosted the drive to a seperate partition, then copied the image to another system and burned it to CD.