Does it work?

[Richard King]

My notebook is very slow. I suspect it is because the 30G hard drive is nearly full (under 300M empty). I have been looking at this hard drive to update it: http://www.drivesolutions.com/cgi-bin/shop/uvstore.cgi?command=listitems&kind=dupgrd&comptype=cpl727&pos=0&type=itemid&itemid=lu8 which I am sure would work just fine. BUT I also need to move the old "stuff" to the new drive and am looking at this to do the job: http://www.drivesolutions.com/cgi-bin/shop/bstore.cgi?command=listitems&kind=accessory&pos=6&type=itemid&itemid=a7

Does anyone have any experience with this product? If so, does it do as it claims? Is it a simple process as they claim? Thanks.

[DonLandis]

Richard- couple of suggestions-

Only buy a 5400 RPM drive. the 4300 ones are noticeabl;y slow. The 7200RPM Fujitsu drives have high failure rate.

To make the switch, I tried those laptop drive upgrade kits and they are really slow. A better way is to buy a couple of the small adapters for about $7 ea. that convert the laptop drive to IDA and then I attach these to USb 2.0 cables. Then simply do a Ghost drive to drive copy and end up with a bigger drive partition on the new one.

[Richard King]

I got an 80G 5400RPM drive along with the kit. It is now in the process of cloning the old drive. Like you said, it is a long process. I started cloning at about 2:30 and it says 4 hours remaining. Oh well, I can get by without the laptop for 4 hours just fine. I'll let you know if it works (in about 4 hours or so).

[JM Anthony]

Get a nice bottle of red wine, some good cheese and crackers and make good use of your spare time.

John

[Cholly]

Richard: how did the upgrade go? I'm interested in doing the same thing with my HP laptop. I'd want to use the PCMCIA kit as well, because my USB adapter is only 1.1 and I'd wait forever to do the transfer.

[Richard King]

Well, I have been too busy to play with it since I last posted. I got an error message when trying to read the new drive that states: "E:\is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable". Sounds serious to me. I should be able to call them tomorrow.

[Richard King]

To continue the story....

On Monday I spoke to tech support. They said to just run the program again as though it had never been run. Last night I finally had the time to give it a shot. I did and after waiting several hours, again, all appears well. I now have a laptop with an 80G hard drive that boots and run just fine and a spare 30G hard drive. :D

[Bogy]

Glad to hear it worked out. Your "E:\is not available" message sounds a little like my experience from the past few days. I was trying to resurrect a P3/500 meg desktop to use in our garage, to serve as a jukebox and so that we could use some diagnostic software without either running into the house or using one of the laptops in the garage (with greasy fingers etc.). The computer refused to see/install a hard drive. I tried a few that I knew still had an operating system installed, and others that were clean. Nothing. I knew some of them might be bad, but not 5 or 6. I checked using a external USB connector on another computer, and all but one were good, but it still wouldn't install any of them. Finally, yesterday it started to recognize a disk, at least temporarily, and then finally consistently. My speculation is that sitting unused over the summer, in a humid garage, caused some corrosion in some connections, and that by plugging/unplugging/replugging the connections and restarting the thing over and over, it finally made a good connection. Otherwise, I magically fixed it. :D