Toshiba Laptop [Hidden Partition?]

[Bil Green]

I'm working on a Toshiba laptop. I'm sorry, but I forgot to get
the model no. today. It's a $4,000 model, has a 80GB drive and
XP (2.8GHz, 512MB RAM).

I'm trying to clone the hard drive to a new Western Digital 250GB
USB drive without success.

Western Digital told me some laptops have a hidden partition and
this usually causes cloning or imaging the drive to fail.

Anyone know how to get around this (or verify that it exists)?

Partition Magic, Partition Expert and Partition Commander don't
see the USB drive (all these programs run in DOS mode).

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MORE DETAILS:

I made three 75GB NTFS partitions on this drive. I prefer cloning
because a cloned drive can usually be booted up when the main
drive fails.

The "Retrospective" backup software that came with the drive is
too confusing for the customer to use (I don't like it either) so
I tried:

1. Paragon Drive Copy (in Windows and then with the bootable CD
version). Hangs up near the end of the copying and in Windows all
the partitions are no longer visible.

2. Handy Backup 3.5 (same problem as above)

3. Acronis True Image (in DOS mode). Says it can't identify the
zero sector of USB hard drive.

[Paul Komski]

I prefer cloning because a cloned drive can usually be booted up when the main
drive fails.

There are major problems booting USB drives so this method is not a solution for drive failure on your laptop. If you want to be able to restore partitions then use clones as image files and not as cloned partitions. BiNG or DriveImage or Ghost would be the sort of applications to do this. BiNG should have no problem with USB2 external drives (you may or may not need to enable its specific USB2 option under its settings if it doesnt work straight away) on a modern machine. Nor will BiNG be daunted by actual size of your large drive.

I suggest you repartition and reformat the external drive since you are having problems accessing it properly at the moment. If the problems persist check the drive with the maker's diagnostic utility and consider writing zeros to the drive.