Help me install new hard drive.

I'm not tech savy so please help me.

I bought a new T500 thinkpad. I took out the old hard drive and placed the new hard drive in. However, I could not boot from the new hard drive.

I called tech support, and he told me that I needed rescue recovery discs.

So I put in my old hard drive, rebooted, and waited for the Thinkpad logo to come up. I then accessed the Rescue and Recovery section.

I went to the section to create rescue disc. I selected the the Q and S drives and then instructed the software to copy these files to my USB jump drive.

Well, I get an error message saying that a certain file could not be copied.

What the heck is going on? Honestly, I'm so annoyed that no recovery discs were physically sent with the computer. Tech support says if I want them, they are 45 dollars.

 

When you put in the new HD, there is no OS installed on their. YOu need a copy of any OS to get it to work.

 

Can someone confirm if you can actually load the recovery data on a USB drive? I have an X200 and this would be super convenient. I would rather not have to buy an external DVD drive if I can help it.

 

umm... you should be booting from the cd's with the new drive installed. That will format the new drive and install the OS from the Resuce & Recovery cds.

I've been going through this s abit myself. In my case I needed to clone the original drive as I had a one of software installed. Easiest for me was to purchase the media bay adaptor for $35 off eBay and use Aconis True Image. Actually as I bought a Segate, I used the Seagate licensed version of Acronis. Several days of messing about distilled to about an hour unattended...

 

If C: was not place on the recovery medium, you are lacking the main windows folder. Q and S are the recovery files to make the recovery disk and a small boot sector to point to the C: drive OS.

If you have complete recovery disks then all you need to do is install the new drive and boot from them. If you don't have them complete. Try again but I think you only get on shot. You may need to buy lenovo recovery disks.

I'm not sure about using the flash drive as recovery medium here.

 

Can anyone confirm if you can boot the recovery disks from a flashdrive? Thanks

 

Q and S are not recovery files, they are partitions. One is the recovery system and the other is a copy of some recovery files that lenovo put in. I did a clean instal omitting any thing but Microsoft stuff and im really glad I did. Then I reinstalled some of the Lenovo stuff.

 

I don't think we are being a lot of help to maxjax800... he did say he is "not tech savy".

If he can make complete restore disks, he will be almost home free. If he can not, booting from the USB won't help since he doesn't have a OS. He didn't save the c: portion even if he could use the USB drive.

If he has a business version of vista, he may be able to make a complete backup and reinstall from that. He would need an external USB drive or a lot of DVD's

If he has a home version of vista, the built in backup won't be enough. If he can't make the backup disks, then he can either buy them or us a third party clone type software to get old drive transfer to the new drive. There are ways to do this without buying things if he has an external USB drive that has enough free space.

Last , he could be his new drive in an ultrabay adapter and have two drives if he doesn't need the DVD/CD drive much.

We need to hear from him about his OS and if he put the old drive back in and tried to make recovery disks. Also if he has an external USB available.

 

Dr Dan, wow, thanks for your complete response.

For those curious, lenovo tech support led me astray by telling me to access the rescue and recovery from the boot up to create the startup discs.

That is incorrect.

To create the rescue discs, one has to do that from the Thinkvantage in windows vista.

It took about 12 CDs to create the startup discs.

However, I still haven't installed my new hard drive yet.

I don't know whether to do a clean install of just Vista onto the new hardrive or restore lenovo factory defaults to the new hard drive.

Sigh.

 

BTW, I did put in my old hard drive back in to create the recovery discs. I'm using VISTA.

 

If you don't have a vista install disk (different than the rescue disks... You would need to have it from another source like a friend or buy one) you CAN NOT do a clean install. I personally think the clean install thing is a bit over done. I didn't have a vista disk when I did my hard drive upgrade but would not have done it anyways since I was in the middle of several projects and did not want to change my setup.

Since this is a new computer, I assume making your machine look like new with a bigger hard drive is your goal. Sooooo... I would pop the new drive in and boot from the rescue disks and be done with it. I don't think you need to format the disk ahead of time (I might be wrong here). It will take a long time to format a large HD (I think it was over one hour for my 500gb).

After you get though all the disks, you should have a machine that looks like it just came from China.

Good luck and post your results

 

What I did, I created rescue media using 2 DVDs, replace the HDD then do the recovery using the discs. It installed everything back to the originals without any inputs.

Secondly I downloaded Rescue and Recovery from the Internet and install it, then do all over rescue again, this time with user inputs, without all the craps programs such as norton etc.

 

Yeah, their revenge for those of us who chose not to spend the $$$ for a DVD writer.

I cannot answer that question for you, but I can offer another strategy.

I recently upgraded the 160GB drive on my T500 to a 500GB drive. When I purchased an external enclosure for a 2.5" drive. (In my case I got a "APRICORN EZ-UP-UNIVERSAL 2.5" USB 2.0 Hard Drive Upgrade Kit" which seems to be a decent unit, though I'm sure any equivalent enclosure would work.)

With the new drive in the external enclosure, I booted a clonezilla CD - an open source tool based on a live Linux CD - and cloned my 160GB HD to the 500 GB drive. Once that was done, I swapped the 500GB drive onto my T500 and it booted both Vista Home Basic and Linux flawlessly.

That's where the fun started. I wanted to grow my Linux partition and could not do so using open source tools. The reason was that Lenovo uses three primary partitions for the Vista install and that left 'gparted' with no options to grow the Linux partition. It took me some work to get it sorted, but during the entire process Vista was always bootable. I suspect that w/out Linux, it would have been easy to grow the Vista partitions to use the entire disk.

The kit came with migration S/W but I did not try it so I cannot comment.

My point is not to recommend specific tools but rather to suggest getting an external USB drive enclosure. Once the transfer is complete, you can then use your old drive (practically new) as a backup device.

HTH,
hank

 

The saga continues...

So I put in my new hard drive, boot up from the rescue cd, and I get a 2100 ; Hard disk drive initialization error.

I call up Lenovo. Tech support tells me to power on the Laptop and then press F1 to get into the BIOS menu. I scrolled down to the SATA option and change it from ACHI to Compatibility.

Everything is working fine now. However, how do I change back form Compatibility to ACHI now????

 

BTW, I thought going to compatibility mode was only necessary if you're installing windows XP.

In my case I was installing Windows vista with a brand new Seagate Momentus 5400.6 hard drive.

 

Did the drive format before the error or only after the BIOS change?
There are only a few advantage I believe to ACHI none of which would mean much to me but just on general principles I would want it enabled.
I don't believe you can just change it back and expect anything other than a BSOD. But I would probably do it and redo the recovery disks. Maybe it will work with the drive now formatted.
Any other opinions out there???????????