Customer Rating:      Summary: Really great. the only to upgrade! Comment: Used upgrade kit to go from 40gb to 160gb HD. Software and hardware worked perfect. In about an hour (10 minutes of paying attention) it was all done. I combined this with a WD Scorpio WD1600BEVS. Also the HD enclosure is built really well. I would recommend this to a friend.
Customer Rating:      Summary: laptop drive cloning Comment: Apricorn Universal EZ 2.5" Hard Drive Upgrade Kit for All Notebook Computers - EZUPUNIVERSAL / EZ-UP-UNIVERSAL
Software is good but I could not use the hardware supplied with this kit as I had to buy a separate 2.5 usb enclosure to complete the clong job.
Customer Rating:      Summary: Stressless upgrade Comment: I upgraded the hard drive in my ancient Compaq Armada E500 laptop from a 12 Gig to a 40 Gig. This package made it an unbelievable smooth and stressless process. Everything went as advertised, software worked great, and now I have a spare external drive as well. I highly recommend this. I was dreading this upgrade, and it turned out to be easy.
Customer Rating:      Summary: It worked with older drives, it fails with newer ones Comment: I used this kit + their EZ Gig 8.1.9 software in the past (2006) to clone the PATA drive in an older Toshiba Satellite laptop. Back then, it worked great and their customer support was responsive and helpful. There was only one minor hiccup: the manual is not clear at all that the target drive must be pre-formatted before use! But it did produce a perfect, bootable clone. Superb for peace of mind and making backups!
Recently, I upgraded my laptop to a new Toshiba Tecra and, naturally, wanted to clone its HDD, too. It has 160 GB SATA Hitachi drive. I got Apricorn's EZ-UP for SATA drives and an identical, blank 160 GB Hitachi. At least I knew to format it beforehand :) I tried cloning with EZ Gig 8.1.9 CD - it didn't work. Apparently, it didn't have the recent USB drivers since it couldn't see the target drive. I sent 3 e-mails to their tech support (also through their website) that were completely ignored. Finally, I found a phone number to one of their Project Managers and asked for help. Thanks to his intervention, the support finally responded with a link to EZ Gig upgrade.
The new EZ Gig version 10.0.5,114 recognized USB, worked, and I got the desired clone... Or so I thought. When I put the clone into the laptop to verify it, it didn't boot. It's visible from running Windows, but it's not bootable. I verified that the target drive was mechanically OK. I reformatted, made it bootable and repeated the cloning. Again, it wasn't booting. I tried and retried all possible options, settings, etc. Apparently, EZ Gig is screwing up the MBR in this case.
After some web searching, I found out I'm not the only one with this problem. Try this search phrase: Apricorn "won't boot" to convince yourself.
It's been 3 weeks since I started and I still cannot achieve my objective. I sent another e-mail to Apricorn's support. So far, I am getting ignored again...
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Added on 08/29/08:
This a follow up to my first review posted on August 12th. I got response from Apricorn support (finally!) after resending my e-mail. It's so pathetic that I am quoting it below in its entirety:
"If you've tried all the options and still cannot get it to boot I would
suggest looking at your bios and making sure it's up to date with the
latest firmware. You could also try using a windows repair cd to run
FIXMBR, doing that will go through and rewrite a standard boot record."
So it's like this: "We screwed up, now *you* fix it", right? Plus a worthless filler-up message about "BIOS version". I already wrote it's a *brand new* laptop, right?
The main problem is: "windows repair cd" (i.e., Windows XP CD from 2003) does not work with SATA hard drives, so I'm stuck again. I wrote my response to Apricorn 20 days ago and didn't get any feedback at all - as expected from Apricorn, unfortunately :(
Customer Rating:      Summary: solid product, easy to use Comment: I had a few hiccups, which I though others might want to know about, but it worked like a charm.
FYI, I am PC user. HP Pavillion dv6200, 80GB, Windows Vista.
The process that you go through is to put your new hard drive (purchased separately) in this device and plug it in as a USB device; install the EZ Gig II software; map the partitions on you current drive to partitions on the new drive; run the cloning software and copy data across; then you exchange drives and you're done.
The software takes a crack at allocating the partitions for you, but that didn't work for me as I had a small recovery partition set up on my original drive. The software wanted to allocate all the extra space to the new copy of the recovery partition.
The software allows you to resize your new partitions so I was able to shrink the recovery partition, but for some reason the software didn't allow me to resize my main partition. It was fixed at 69GB.
So I called the free tech support and after a few minutes (5 I think) I spoke with someone who gave me a suggestion on how to fix it. I organized the new drive so that my main partition was at the front of the new drive and the recovery partition was at the back of the new drive, leaving unallocated space between.
I ran the cloning software (it took about 2 hours) and exchanged the hard drives (really quite easy). Once finished, I used Windows disk management utilities and expanded the partition to absorb all the unallocated space. Viola, complete.
Overall, I am extremely pleased with the upgrade and upgrade process.
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