8. The Practical Experience: Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade With "small" Obstacles

Just click "Proceed" to begin the backup... Not!

The very first time we tried to clone our notebook's drive following the instructions in the manual, we hit a snag. While we had installed both hardware and software in the recommended manner, the system would hang during the scheduled reboot before the actual cloning process started, displaying the error message "Disk not Found...Press any key to reboot..." Following the prompt, we pressed a button, and the system rebooted as promised, but unfortunately, that was it. Creating a backup proved impossible.

A member of Apricorn's support team suspected that the USB port was the root of the problem, caused the problem problem was caused by the USB port, which the OS may have been initializing too late during boot-up process. As a result, the external drive could not initialize in time for the backup program to detect it and to thus begin the copying process.

As a workaround, the support person recommended that we try booting Clone EZ directly from the CD. To be exact, it is actually a miniature Linux that is booted from the CD. This ensures that both the USB port and the external drive are initialized correctly and on time. While this workaround did indeed work, the speed with which our backup then proceeded did not exactly have us jumping for joy.

After several time-consuming and nerve-wracking "cross-reference" testing with other notebooks and hard drives, we found the cause for the abortive backup process under Windows XP and determined that the FAT32 file system as the "culprit." After all, cloning the NTFS-formatted internal drives of the other PCs we used for our cross-referencing didn't pose any problems at all.

After having converted the file system of our original notebook from FAT32 to NTFS, cloning this drive also went off without a hitch under Windows XP.