Drive Cloning Problem

Hope I can explain the problem here! Working on some 250 Hp laptops for the DptOfState (DOS). Laps came with Vista, obviously thats taboo - so far. They want XP Pro. No prob - or so I thought! First 10 laps went to Norway, they had 120G WD drives - Made an HP XP Pro image with Hp drivers & recovery partition etc from an original uninstalled HP drive and blitzed the 10 120G drives, (about 6-7 minutes each), got licenses - all was well in Muddville. Second batch of laps have 80G Toshiba drives with Vista, again a no-no. No problem - Ski to the rescue with my trusty Hirens CD and Acronis. Besides taking near a hour to blitz the drive with the image, it only boots to 'Press F11 for Recovery......' and stops. Tried numerous times on different 80G drives. Tried cloning as opposed to imaging the drive, same problem. Tried fdisk/format/copy and make bootable. Tried used drives and brand new drives - all Toshiba 80s'. Tried about 6 different programs, - Acronis True Image, Ghost, Drive Image, etc. even pressed F11 and let it recover itself - all with the same result. The strange thing is all the drives will boot to Windows on the test bench desktops. The sames drives with the original Vista boot on the laps - no problem. These are all SATA drives. The system partition is NTFS - no drive letter, the backup partition is FAT32. Both partitions are primary and the NTFS is Active and bootable.
We have to ship a number of these very soon and luckily I just tried to help - not my project YET - another engineers' hooters are in the wringer....

I've heard stories that Vista does something to some drives - I find that hard to beleive - or do I??? All the 120G WD drives with XP run just fine........

Sorry about the length...

Thanx

 

You may be up against "cross-platform ".

Win XP does not seem to work well on a partition created by Vista (there are articles at the MS knowledgebase).

When I tried to find utilities to work on a Toshiba drive in a Compaq computer, I was referred to the Startup/BIOS settings of the computer There was a menu to diagnose the drive.

The other factor may be the DOS (FAT32) recovery/restore drive.

You may find that the tests/checks for a Toshiba drive are in the BIOS settings and that is why the Toshibas react differently.

You may want to check the forums at the HP website. They are directed at business applications.

Matt

 

Matt - Thanx for the new venue.... Thought never crossed my mind about XP on a Vista partition. Can't get to the machines til tomorrow, but I will follow this one up.

Thanx again

 

I'm believing now the 'cross platform' thing has something to do with it, and I further believe that SATA has some more to do with it!! Fdisk & Formated 2 80G Toshiba drives. Cloned 2 80G Toshibas from a working 80G Hitachi drive that had the HP XP system & recovery partition.... Both drives came up - '.......your recovery partition has been deleted - press F10 to try to recover any other key to delete the partition.....' After pressing F11 to recover and waiting some 30 minutes or so - the same thing...... hangs at 'Press F121 for recovery' Remind you, this is AFTER an Fdisk & Format!!!

HP was no help - '....we do not condone copying a drive....' even though we have new numbers for the drives, and MS has included a procedure to override the EULA in the respect of removing Vista.....

We are at a loss here.... Haven't come across this until now....

 

Have you worked on HP's before?

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...810279&prodTypeId=321957&prodSeriesId=1842187
Any help?

I think you will need to work with HP's business support.

Matt

 

Matt - Yes, we work with a lot of HP products, besides laptops, some 2000 Thin Clients, 250 Scanners, just about all of their printer line, and desktops too. We also deal with most of the other major manufacturers too. This particular run of laptops has gone to near 650. Our end users are more concerned with the Tempest capabilities of our products than the actual machine capabilities. If you are nor familiar with 'Tempest' - we develop & build electronically secure products - no traceable electronic signature.
HP told us how to create a working set of CDs (9 of them) to restore the 80G drives. It works, but it takes near 3 hours each.... almost unacceptable with our time constraints. Made 2 of the drives today, after checking for operation - made an image to use with Acronis, Ghost, and Drive Image - all failed. Tried drive to drive copy using the same software - no go. Keep in mind, the 120G WD drive works with no problem, and the failing 80's will boot on most other machines in the shop, just not on the lap!!!
HP also has some kind of 'fail safe' that only permits you to make 1 copy of the CDs and use it ONLY once on any given drive????? Go figure. I feel if I blitz the drive and the MBR, the drive is clean, BUT maybe it's in reverse - the program records the drive serial # - who knows.

Still at a loss....

Thanx

Ski

This is what it is.
This is where it is.

 

No problem Ski. I/we here are mostly Home User support. I have really only gotten "down and dirty" with a colleague's Compaq laptop (home user). That was not a pretty sight until I worked worked out that a SMART drive error message was not being displayed at startup when it was supposed to be.

I work with the database at HP, they have a very good database, so I can come across some solutions.

I might have suggested getting the Win XP "recovery" disks for the laptop model, but you seem to have done that.
I might have suggested that you image the drive rather than the whole disk, but you seem to have done that.

You will need to work with the "business solutions" side of HP support, of which, I am not familiar.

The recovery disks that take 3 hours, can you set them up in a production line? It may take, say, a day's work.

Matt

 

I wonder if your problem Ski might be related to something else I’d like to get to the bottom of "“ that is why some Vista laptops will just not accept an XP install, for no easily discernable reason. Your situation sounds like there is some other layer of interference that is getting in your way. I wonder if it could be something to do with "˜Trusted Computing’ and if the Toshiba hard drive has a TPM chip that is working with the laptop's TPM chip and maybe even with Vista itself "“ regardless of whether BitLocker is configured or not. www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/faq/TPMFAQ

 

McTavish - Thanx for the reply, and some 'new' info. Don't really know what the 'Trusted Platform Module' is but you may have something with the thought. Again today, made numerous XP 120G drives for test purposes, an 80G Hitachi that was OK, but no 80G Toshibas. Tried copying files, making bootable and copying partitions. Even tried converting the system part from NTFS to FAT32, but the boot sector is totally different in DOS (should have known...) The 2 1/2 to 3 hour slow burn with the CDs is the only thing that seems to work, and afterwards we can't duplicate the running drive using Toshiba drives...... We still have a little time before it becomes critical. Bottom line - we will probably wind up buying a couple of hundred 120G WD drives - may have a BIG sale on 80G Toshiba drives....

I will follow your link to see if I can gleen anything from TPM.....