Can I upgrade my Lenovo A730 IdeaCentre 1TB HD to a 2TB HDD?

[ronells200]

I have a Lenovo A730 IdeaCentre and my Hard Drive crashed. It is currently a 1TB HGST (Western Digital, Travelstar 5K1000) 5400 PRM, SATA 6Gb/s, 8MB cache hard drive. I would like to upgrade to a 2TB hard drive. I can not find any information on the motherboard (Sharkbay, ver 31900003 STD) or the BIOS (LENOVO, ver: I8KT15AUS) to get this info. I am able to find a Seagate Spinpoint M9T ST2000LM003 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s hard drive in the same form factor for only $4 more than the 1TB. Is the BIOS able to upgrade to a 2TB HD?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there ronells200,

As long as this 2 TB drive has the same dimensions, then I believe it should be fine.
Yet, it will not really hurt to contact the manufacturer's Support on that.

You can consider cloning the drive as well. That way, you will not really need to perform a clean OS installation. There are many threads on that in the community.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[ronells200]

Yes, I verified the config of the HD and they match. I thought of that, but I don't believe I can clone the HD because it is not bootable. I am running ddrescue (Linux) on it to create an image of the partition. This way I can run a data recovery software on the image and not worry about corrupting the drive. I had backup software running for once a week, Sat night, but would like to see if I can recover the data in between backups.

I called Lenovo Tech Support and they only had the build config's in their system and did not know if it could be upgraded. They forwarded me to Sales, but their system was down. Tech support did however give me a p/n (90003046) but it is a Lenovo p/n. I found a site in the UK the sells the board and they give more numbers: CIHM86, DAOWY1MB8E0, & 31WY1MB00A0, but I get nowhere with them either except a site in Indonesia that say's they have have a 2015 BIOS. dmidecode (Linux) says my BIOS is I8KT15AUS 4/18/13 rev 0.15 and it is a Sharkbay. I did find that Intel did make a Shark Bay MB, but that's all I can find on Intel's website. They require chipsets to go any further.

Update: 10/7 I posted on Intel's site and received a reply. Apparently Sharkbay is a Platform that utilize the Haswell (4th generation Intel Core) processor and a Lynx Point chipset. So anyone could've produced the board. He said if the BIOS is UEFI-compliant, it has support for hard drives that are 3TB or larger in size, but Some of the OEMs implement white lists in their BIOS. That is, their BIOS will only support a specific set of add-ons. Looks like it's a good chance it will take the 2TB drive, but I'm back to Lenovo for the answer.

Update 10/9/16: I checked with Lenovo Tech support again, they still did not know, they could only tell me what the system was configured for. They said the max config for the Bios was 1TB because that was the max config of the model, but were not really sure and call Best Buy they would know for sure. I talked to 2 Geek Squad techs, online chat, and they both said it would handle a 2TB HDD. Therefore I will be installing a 2TB HDD.

D_Know_WD, I'm sorry I guess if I can image a partition I could clone the hard drive, it's just neither would be bootable. Would a cloning software still work with corrupted data? ddrescue will write zero's, or skip them , when it cannot read a block (if I read it correctly) and then continues, but it's been running for 2 weeks now and only half way done. I must have done something wrong.

 

[ronells200]

I purchased the 2TB HDD. So, going with that. Ordered a 9.5mm drive, supplier sent me a 7mm drive. So I researched 7mm drives. Found that they are interchangeable with an adapter. Offered to keep the drive if they would supply the 9.5mm to 7mm adapter, he said to send the drive back for a refund. Cost him more for return shipping than the price of the adapter. So I ordered another HD, a better 7mm HD for only $4 more and an adapter for $4.50. Will update the progress once I install it.

D_Know_WD, when you mentioned cloning, would that be different from running ddrescue and imaging the drive? I've tried demo versions of Windows recovery software like Recover My Data, Paragon, Lazesoft and Acronis True Image but the all crap out (it's been a while so I for get the errors). Linux ddrescue has been the only successful option so far, but it has a problem also. The Partition Table is skewed. I could open another thread if your interested in helping.

 

[D_Know_WD]

I don't think you will get a bootable HDD out of this situation.
What you can try, is to use the tool in question, and use it's sector by sector clone, which skips bad blocks. Then, I believe you can try to get your data, out of the healthy drive.

Do you mean that you've set it up to skip bad blocks and it's been running that long?

Also, I don't think I get notifications about the edits.

D_Know_WD

 

[ronells200]

It may be because I forget to check the " Enable email notification of this thread" block.

 

[ronells200]

I don't think you will get a bootable HDD out of this situation.
What you can try, is to use the tool in question, and use it's sector by sector clone, which skips bad blocks. Then, I believe you can try to get your data, out of the healthy drive.

Do you mean that you've set it up to skip bad blocks and it's been running that long?

Also, I don't think I get notifications about the edits.

D_Know_WD

As a newbie I started out with

ddrescue -R /dev/sda5 /media/sdb1/image.img

but it was only half way done. I was told that using -R was a last resort and it was taking too long, it should only be hrs. So I researched and found:

method: Antonio Diaz's GNU 'ddrescue'".

# first, grab most of the error-free areas in a hurry:
./ddrescue -n /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log
# then try to recover as much of the dicy areas as possible:
./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

So I used:

#ddrescue -n /dev/sda5 /media/sdb1/Backup_image/091616.img

which only took under 6hrs

and then:

#ddrescue -r 1 /dev/sda5 /media/sdb1/Backup_image/091616.img

It finally succeded with an image, but when I mount the image using kpartx

# kpartx -av /media/sdb1/Backup_image/image_091616.img

partitions sda1, sda2 and sda3 mount, but sda4-7 fail to mount. sda5 is the c: drive partition I'm trying to recover.

I've been told the partition file has been re-structured.
I am wondering if I can edit the partition table for the image file. Everywhere I read say's you can do to an image what you can do to a drive.
With the partition table being restructured I guess ddrescue doesn't know where to start so it copies the entire drive, all 7 partitions.

 

[ronells200]

I've been away from the system for a while, just getting back to it. I am running foremost on the image right now, only selecting to search for jpegs, pdf's, docx and xlsx files. Recovering quite a bit of data, a lot of it are pretty small files so I'm sure they're useless. It's going to take a while to sort through the useless data and what I want to save.

I should be installing the new 2TB HDD this week.

 

[ronells200]

I installed the 2TB HDD and 16GB of memory, the system recognized them just fine. Reinstalled the OS with no problems and I am currently reinstalling my programs. After that I will create a full backup as it is so I can recover at this state of time if this ever happens again.