T61 and prior T series ThinkPad Laptops

[#1]

Hi, guys,

I want to upgrade the hard drive of my T61. My current one is only 80GB.  Is there any one has good experience? I plan to buy Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Blue SATAII 5400RPM 2.5IN 8MB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive WD3200BEVT  or the 7200RPM version. Are these two both working well? After upgrade the hard drive, how can I immigrate my current system to that new hard drive? Thanks in advance for any suggestion!

[#2]

Either hard drive will work fine in your T61. To transfer your operating system, you can use the trail version of an Acronis boot disk to clone your old hard drive onto the new one. Or if you haven't already, you can burn the factory recovery disks and use them on your new hard drive.

[#3]

I have been struggling with a similar problem all week.  I used Acronis to clone my 250 G drive from a T61 to a 500 GB drive in an external SATA mount.  If I look at the cloned drive, everything is there (both partitions, scaled up).  When I swap the 500 GB drive into the machine, it will not boot -- just a blinking cursor in the upper left corner.  Any suggestions?

TIA.

[#4]

Have you gone into BIOS to re-detect the drive?  Shouldn't need to, but it may requie it.

[#5]

Did you clone with Acronis within Windows or by using the boot cd?

I've always had success with the boot cd but not always within Windows.

[#6]

In terms of BIOS, when I used F12 to tell it where to boot, it did list the internal drive as being present (in addition to the CD/DVD).

I couldn't get the bootable CD to see my external USB mouted new drive so I ran Acronis from within Windows.  When I told it to do the cloning, it rebooted into something more like DOS.

any other suggestions?  I'm using an old version of Acronis True Image (v. 9.0 build 3,633).

Thanks.