Upgrading the Lenovo S10 Hard Drive using Clonezilla

While I love the prospect of using my Lenovo S10 as a portable media player, the 80GB hard drive that it ships is on the small side for a hard-drive based netbook. Not only is the drive small, but the crazy partitioning (basically split into system and data partitions, FAT and NTFS respectively) further limits how you can use the space. So I picked up a 320GB 2.5" hard drive (Hitachi 5K320 320GB 5400RPM) and went about upgrading the drive.

More about my upgrade experience and how to back up the drive image coming up next...

Laptop Magazine has a great, easy to follow feature on how to upgrade the S10's hard drive. However, since Lenovo doesn't ship recovery/reinstallation disks, you'll need to back up the drive yourself. While you might be able to use the bundled OneKey Recovery software to do that, without an external optical drive to boot the recovery CD for the restore, I didn't want to chance that.

In order to fully backup and recover the S10 without needing an external optical drive, you can use the open-source program Clonezilla to do the backup and restore of the original Lenovo image. You'll need:

• A 2.5" notebook SATA hard drive, hopefully larger than the one that the S10 ships with :)
• A FAT32-formatted USB hard drive or flash thumb drive with around 10GB free
• A flash thumb drive that you can erase for the Clonezilla Live boot image. I'm guessing at least 256MB capacity, though you might be able to get away with a 128MB drive. If you have a 16GB flash drive, you probably can store the S10 backup image on it as well.
• The zip archive of Clonezilla Live
• Live USB Helper (to make the flash drive bootable)
• Access to the Clonezilla Live how-to or a printout of those instructions. And these :)
  

Disclaimer: While I "ate my own dog food" here and was able to successfully upgrade my hard drive using these tools, I make no guarantees that nothing will go wrong with your upgrade. The act of replacing the hard drive might void your warranty, and I don't know how receptive Lenovo would be to reloading your system with the factory image if something should go wrong. Also, Clonezilla isn't the easiest or most-user friendly cloning software out there, but it's free. If you want easy and friendly, you'll have to pay for that.

The upgrade goes something like this:

• 1.) Insert the USB drive you want to boot Clonezilla off of. Make sure it doesn't contain any data you want to save.
• 2.) Install Live USB Helper (LUH). There's an option to install the source code, but unless that sort of thing interests you, you can leave it unchecked.
• 3.) When you run LUH, you'll probably get an error that vb6stkit.dll is missing. Follow the instructions in the Clonezilla Live how-to to get a copy of that DLL. It may require a reboot or manually registering the DLL with Windows (Google if you need help with that).
• 4.) Once LUH is running, it's fairly self-explanatory how to get your flash drive bootable.
• 5.) The next step is a bit confusing. To install Clonezilla Live on your newly-bootable flash drive, just unzip the archive onto the root of the drive, preserving the folder structure. So, if the flash drive is G:\, make sure the archive is unzipped into G:\.
• 6.) Feel free to prepare your system for imaging by deleting non-essential files, installing software or Windows updates. Basically, whatever you do to the system now will be replicated to the new hard drive.
• 7.) Shut down the S10, leaving the flash drive inserted. Make sure the USB drive where you will save your backup image is NOT inserted.
• 8.) Boot up the S10 and press F2 at the BIOS screen (best bet is to press F2 several times until you're sure you're entering the BIOS setup. Change the boot order so that your USB flash drive boots before the hard drive. Save and exit.
• 9.) Your S10 should now boot into Linux and you'll get to a screen similar to step 5 in the Clonezilla how-to. Be sure to select the 800x600 display option or else it will fail (the S10 only has a 600 pixel vertical resolution).
• 10.) Choose your language. Don't change the keymap. Start Clonezilla.
• 11.) Select "device-image disk/partition to/from image".
• 12.) Select "local_dev". If you are not saving the drive image on the same USB flash drive you booted from, insert the USB drive when prompted. Pay attention to the disk name that will scroll on the screen, since that's what you want to select on the next screen.
• 13.) Once you've selected the disk where you'll save your S10 backup image, select "savedisk". Note: this will replicate the partitions as Lenovo created them (including the strange partitioning and filesystem choices). If you feel especially ambitious and geeky, you can elect to save specific partitions and manually customize the partitioning on the new drive. I took the path of least resistance and just saved the whole thing.
• 14.) On the advanced extra parameters screen, just leave it at default.
• 15.) On the next screen, you might want to check "Remove page and hiberation files in Win if exists" to save some space on the image.
• 16.) Unless you're especially space-challenged on your backup target, keep the default compression option.
• 17.) If you want to later archive your backup image to CD/DVD, you can play around with the image file size. Just keep it under 4GB (the maximum file size supported by FAT32).
• 18.) Give the backup image a name, select the source drive, and confirm the backup job.
• 19.) Go get a cup of coffee. It took about 25 minutes to save backup the image to a 4200RPM USB 2.0 external drive.
• 20.) Assuming no errors, shut down Clonezilla live and turn off the S10.
• 21.) Follow the instructions on how to physically upgrade the S10's hard drive. Even though Laptop Mag says that the drive in their unit was a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, mine had a Hitachi 5K320 80GB drive, July 2008 vintage.
• 22.) Remove the USB drive the backup is stored on (if different from the bootable USB flash drive).
• 23.) Boot up to Clonezilla live, repeating steps 9-12 above.
• 24.) Once you've again selected the drive where you saved the S10 image backup to, select "restoredisk".
• 25.) Leave the advanced extra parameters alone.
• 26.) Again, if you want to monkey around with the partitions on your new drive, do so at your own risk. Otherwise, use the default "Use the partition table from the image" option.
• 27.) Select the backup image name, the target (i.e. the newly installed, unformatted drive), and confirm the restore job.
• 28.) Refill your cup of coffee. It took about 15 minutes to restore the image.
• 29.) Shutdown Clonezilla Live, remove all USB drives, and reboot the S10.
• 30.) Windows should boot normally. The only problem you may run into is with installed software who's licensing can detect a change in the hardware fingerprint of the system (i.e. the drive upgrade itself makes the software think it's installed on a different computer). That happened with me and my Avast! anti-virus license.
• 31.) I would recommend converting the system partition (C:) to NTFS using convert.exe.
• 32.) Finally, unless you manually tinkered with the partitions, the last step is to create a new partition for the remainder of the upgraded drive. Start > Run (or Win-R) -> diskmgmt.msc. Create a new extended partition on the S10's drive from the unpartitioned space. Format the space (I recommend using NTFS, but if you want FAT32 for whatever reason, go for it).
• 33.) Enjoy your new cavernous hard drive.

Even preserving Lenovo's partitioning, my new 320GB drive now has about a 220GB partition for media. Total cost for the upgrade: about $90.