Hard Disk upgrade problems

I've been trying to upgrade the internal hard drive on my Acer TravelMate 8100 laptop from the Seagate 100gb SATA drive that came with the unit to a new Western Digital 160 gb SATA hard drive. I used Apricorn's EZGig SATA device to create a copy of my internal drive on the new drive, but when I install the new drive in the computer's hard disk bay, I get an error that states "NTLDR Is Missing." I am assuming, since the disk copy was apparently successful, that my new hard drive is working. When I reinstall my old hard drive, the computer boots up fine.

As background, I had performed a diskcheck and defrag on my old drive before copying it to the new hard drive (copy may not be the right word; EZGig supposedly creates a perfect copy so that the new drive is bootable), so problems associated with the source disk are probably not a factor.

If anyone has any ideas what's not working, I would appreciate the help.

 

It appears that you are lacking some bootup files. Which option did you use in the EZGig's software? There should be an upgrade option. If you used backup then the software will have copied the files but not made the HDD bootable.

John

 

I used the upgrade option, which was supposed to have created a bootable hard drive. I am wondering if the problem may have something to do with the system BIOS (recognizing a 160 gb hard drive), or whether the hard drive might be a lemon.

By means of background, the first time I had attempted to upgrade the hard drive, the copy process failed after just a few minutes due to a write error on sector 2. I had been moving the disk (and had it upside down), so I wasn't sure if the moving it might have jiggled one of the connecting cables; when I tried a second time to do the upgrade, there were no errors and the software reported a succesful clone. The cloning process took about 14-16 hours.

 

Thanks for the clarification. I don't think it would be the BIOS. Does the BIOS info screen report the HDD size correctly? Do you have a Windows recovery CD? You may find that if you put the new HDD in and then run the repair option on the recovery CD it will fix the missing files. That is certainly worth a try.

The next possibility is to see what Seagate's Disc Wizard can do. Seatools can check the HDD, but is currently only available as a DOS application. Failing that, try rerunning the whole upgrade.

John

 

I have the Apricorn EZ Upgrade kit and have used it many times without fail.
Be sure that you select to "Clone" your drive, as anything else will simply copy files and set up the new drive as a non-bootable external drive. Maybe this is what happened in your case?

 

No, I definitely performed a Clone. I've also used the Apricorn in the past, but often have had problems with it (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't).

 

When I use "F2" in startup, the boot-up screen shows the new hard drive and accurately reports its size. Once I leave this set of screens, though, I get the error message I reported above. I will attempt to start-up to a recovery CD with my new HDD installed and see if that works. Thanks for your help!