DriveCopy 4.0

Rating:
Summary: You Don't Have To Be a Computer Wiz
Review: As soon as I received my copy of DriveCopy 4.0 I sat down to read the manual, install the program on floppies, install,configure and copy the new hard drive, remove the old one and voila! I had the new device running! It was that easy! I personally recommend this program to everyone.

Rating:
Summary: Not a product for the faint of heart....
Review: I could not get this product to install correctly using the "virtual floppy" option on Windows Millenium. The product has some limitations which are not clearly spelled out in the advertising or the reviews. Namely, you must keep your current partitions intact, although you can copy them over to a new physical drive (ie you can't "collapse" two or more existing partitions into one new partition). I wanted to copy over the contents of an existing C:, D:, and E: drive to an existing, second, already partitioned physical drive - but I wanted this drive to be a single C: partition. You can't do this - you have to copy over the C: D: and E: partitions to an *empty* second physical drive and create the same partitions on the new drive. To its credit, DriveCopy will automatically proportionally resize those same partitions on the new physical dive to maximize the available space on it.

On the credit side: My one call to PowerQuest Tech Support was very productive - the guy I spoke to was knowledgable and helpful. However, he couldn't make the default virtual floppy install work for me either, I ended up installing onto conventional floppies. After that, the copy process was relatively painless and pretty quick.

Some follow-up notes: Since using this product to copy my Windows Millenium installation from one physical drive to another, I've experienced many, many Windows and/or application failures. Prior to this move my Windows installation was relatively stable (perhaps one app or Windows failure per month - it's now about 1-2 per two-hour session). Are the issues related? I can't prove it of course - but I'm suspicious. I don't mean to blame the DriveCopy product here - this is a weakness of the Windows operating system. Still, it's you the user who feels the pain!

Also please note that if you use this product to move your bootable partition (your C: drive) to another physical disk - you must know how to ensure that the new disk is configured correctly (usually via manual jumper wires or switches on the disk itself) to be the Master IDE drive. Note: this assumes you have IDE disk drives - versus SCSI. The vast majority of you will have IDE drives (because they're cheaper!), and they must be configured as either a master or a slave. At the end of the day, the bootable drive MUST be configured as the IDE Master and any other disk on the same IDE channel must be configured as a slave. Moving the jumpers or switches per se is easy - as long as you know what you're doing and/or you have documentation from your disk manufacturer. Getting it wrong may cause your PC to fail to boot up. Don't expect PowerQuest to tell you how to do this - if changing switch options or jumper wires on your hard disk makes you uncomfortable, then don't use this product to move your C: drive to another disk! Or, be prepared to pay a technician to come and do it for you.

Good luck!

Rating:
Summary: Buyer Beware
Review: I tried to use this software to upgrage from a 10 gigabyte hard drive to a 40 gigabyte hard drive, a common enough task. The program took about 3 hours to perform the cloning. However, I never could get the new disk to work. I spend days on this. The powerquest web site offers very little help. I finally gave up and bought Norton Ghost. It performed the cloning in 11 minutes! And, the new disk worked perfectly. I now have 30 gigabytes of free disk space and I didn't have to reinstall my operating system and my software. My advice: forget Powerquest software unless you want to waste your time.

Rating:
Summary: Does not work on XP
Review: If I could give this product 0 stars I would.I used the Virtual flpooy mode first and copied it to my new maxtor 60 Gig hard drive, when done it wouldn't boot up. So then I tried the create program disk mode and again it said that the operation was a sucess. Tried to boot up, nothing but errors. After about 3 hours of wasting my time and money I had to re-install windows Xp from scratch. The drive utility that came with the Maxtor Hard Drive was more useful than this over priced [item]. Maybe it does work in Windows 98 or Me which allows you to run in DOS but not in XP. Powerquest has no updates for this product.

Rating:
Summary: Watch out - This version is buggy!
Review: This release touts a "virtual floppy" mode, which after multiple attempts (and many hours) I could never get to complete a straight drive-to-drive copy. Nowhere close to the ease and dependability of DriveCopy 3.0, but the 30G limitation of that version makes it nearly obsolete. This version (and the included documentation) need some serious corrective work before it will be as reliable as the previous version. A complete waste of my money...

Rating:
Summary: Great for Win98
Review: Took 3 hrs to transfer 8gigs from a 10gig Ultra ATA100 to to a new 40gig Ultra ATA100 both at 7200rpm with a 400MHz. -An hour and a half to read the book,copy 2disks, open the computer, set the jumpers (which only took my removeing the jumper from my new drive- since my old drive was the master all along, boot up the computer with the new drive as a slave,(to see if the bios recognized it- which it did), turn it off, boot from A: with the copied disks, follow directons on screen.
- The program itself took about 45min to do it's job on the recommended fast mode. - Another 45min to remove the old drive, place the new one in, restart, breath sigh of relief, close up computer and restart again, sigh again. - and restart again, this time with smile on face, (just to make sure it worked of course).