I have an HP Pavilion laptop computer - Model dv6119us. The OEM hard
drive was filling up so I bought a larger replacement notebook drive.

I used Acronis True Image 9 to clone the existing drive onto the new
drive (using a USB external HD enclosure). That seemed to work fine as
Windows Explorer confirmed the data on the new drive.

However, when I pulled the old drive out of the laptop, I noticed that
my new drive had different connectors than the old drive. Both drives
are Serial ATA - the original is a Fujitsu SATA drive and the new drive
is a Seagate Momentus Serial ATA150 drive. (I had been told that a
Serial ATA150 should be able to replace the SATA drive with no problem.)
However, when I boot-up I get a message that the Operating System
isn't being found, and the laptop won't boot. I tried changing boot
order in the BIOS, but that didn't help.

I'm sure that the OS (Windows XP Media Edition) was copied over to the
new drive. So is this message due to the drives being physically
incompatible (ie - the different connectors)? If so, is there some
conversion connector that can be used? Or is HP such a proprietary
brand of notebook that only another Fujitsu or HP hard drive would work?

Or is it that the new drive needs to be be made "Bootable" somehow? Note
that there are no jumpers or switches to set on it.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

BRH wrote:
while still running from the old drive.
Windows wil assign a drive letter, and write it to the disk.
Now when you try to boot from the new disk, it will still
have that assigned drive letter, and your boot will fail
halfway.
Just clone your disk , and without checking, put it in
as bootdisk.

Serial ATA & Serial ATA150 are the same thing (if anything is different,
it's sata300, which is twice as fast ... but almost no 2.5" drives use
it yet).

Cloning a bootable OS partition sometimes just does not work.

Further, some laptops do "screwy" things with their hard drives (this is
most common w/IBM, but sometimes others also).


BRH wrote:

Thanks to you both for your replies! I finally got it worked out. It
turns out that my HP laptop uses an adaptor to connect the SATA HD to
the motherboard. The problem was that I didn't realize that it was an
adaptor which could, and should, be removed and put on the new HD.

Once I realized that, all was well.

Note: I ended up re-cloning before I realized the thing about the
adaptor. It probably wasn't necessary, but didn't hurt anything.

Thanks again!




Barry Watzman wrote:

Barry Watzman wrote:

Barry

You are quite right that IBM and notably Thinkpads do "screwy" things to
their hard drives, in the boot sector. Still, cloning the whole disk
(and not only the boot partition, which sometimes does not work) does
work, at least with True Image, I never had a case where this failed.

What fails, but this is a different issue, is cloning with True Image if
an OEM recovery partition remains on the destination disk. True Image
just quits at reboot, with a "success" message but actually, it did not
do anything. You need to manually delete the recovery partition. I
encountered the problem while getting rid of Vista, installing XP and
installing a larger disk on a new machine.

As many other tools, it seems True Image sometimes has trouble with NTFS
partitions, one more reason I stay with XP and FAT32. Please don't tell
me what I am missing in NTFS ... I know, I tried it and it was the only
time in 20 years of computing I faced a situation my disk got so
trashed, I just had to reformat it and reinstall everything.

Regards
--
John Doue