I recently purchased a hard drive and did the hours of set-up work for a clean install with drivers, old photos, music, it is perfect. The problem is that I do not like the hard drive I purchased. Can I buy the hard drive I want and use this product and cloning software to transfer out the drive that I have all set-up but hate? Thanks. I recently purchased a hard drive and did the hours of set-up work for a clean install with drivers, old photos, music, it is perfect. The problem is that I do not like the hard drive I purchased.... » Read More I recently purchased a hard drive and did the hours of set-up work for a clean install with drivers, old photos, music, it is perfect. The problem is that I do not like the hard drive I purchased. Can I buy the hard drive I want and use this product and cloning software to transfer out the drive that I have all set-up but hate? Thanks. « Show Less
602541
This just an empty shell to place a hard drive into, I used the one I purchased for the hard drive I removed from my dead laptop
602542
Yes you can. That's what I did with my Sony Viao. I purchaced the drive and an external holder with a usb connection ($8 from amazon). I used NTI Echo 3 ($19) to clone the drive. After the coloning process I swapped drives. Took about an hour to do the whole thing. Mostly waiting for the cloning process.
602543
When buying a new drive, you need to not only look at size but speed and other factors like data buffering. You'll need to do a comparison of the drive you're replacing with this one. I've been using this drive for about four months now and it works as good as or better than the factory installed one. I bought it mostly for the additional space and I'll have enough space to last the life of this laptop.
286962
Hi William: I have so far had a good experience with the LaCie 3TB minimus (with Windows 7). It is possible I may have a review of it on Amazon. My concerns were largely issues of formatting a 3TB drive. But an official vendor's quote could be taken if you make a pdf of the Amazon page for the relevant product. I would think the same goes for any other site. And give the school a printout of the pdf. They can verify it independently as well once you have given them the pdf. If the school is bureaucratic about it get written quotes from neighbourhood computer stores. That ought to do it. Good luck!! Hi William: I have so far had a good experience with the LaCie 3TB minimus (with Windows 7). It is possible I may have a review of it on Amazon. My concerns were largely issues of formatting a 3TB drive. But an official vendor's quote could be taken if you make a pdf of the Amazon page for the relevant product. I would think the same goes for any other site. And give the school a printout of the pdf. They can verify it independently as well once you have given them the pdf. If the school is bureaucratic about it get written quotes from neighbourhood computer stores. That ought to do it.... » Read More Hi William: I have so far had a good experience with the LaCie 3TB minimus (with Windows 7). It is possible I may have a review of it on Amazon. My concerns were largely issues of formatting a 3TB drive. But an official vendor's quote could be taken if you make a pdf of the Amazon page for the relevant product. I would think the same goes for any other site. And give the school a printout of the pdf. They can verify it independently as well once you have given them the pdf. If the school is bureaucratic about it get written quotes from neighbourhood computer stores. That ought to do it. Good luck!! « Show Less
542383
Sorry, no. It's rare nowadays for any supplier to provide installation media. They almost always do, however, create a small protected partition on the hard-drive which the operating system can use to restore the computer to it's "as-delivered" condition in the event of a "hard fault" failure to start. The best thing you can do yourself is create an image of your system on an external storage drive as it is when you are satisfied with it. That way you can restore it to the original drive, or to a newer/faster/bigger or solid state drive when you want better performance or more storage space. Sorry, no. It's rare nowadays for any supplier to provide installation media. They almost always do, however, create a small protected partition on the hard-drive which the operating system can use to restore the computer to it's "as-delivered" condition in the event of a "hard fault" failure to start. The best thing you can do yourself is create an image of your system on an external storage drive as it is when you are satisfied with it. That way you can restore it to the original drive, or to a newer/faster/bigger or solid state drive when you want better performance... » Read More Sorry, no. It's rare nowadays for any supplier to provide installation media. They almost always do, however, create a small protected partition on the hard-drive which the operating system can use to restore the computer to it's "as-delivered" condition in the event of a "hard fault" failure to start. The best thing you can do yourself is create an image of your system on an external storage drive as it is when you are satisfied with it. That way you can restore it to the original drive, or to a newer/faster/bigger or solid state drive when you want better performance or more storage space. « Show Less
843672
Yes, the install offers an upgrade or to do a full (clean) install which is what I did. If you're putting an SSD and hard drive in to your machine, don't connect the hard drive until after the install if you want the OS to be on the SSD. The installer can get confused if you have more than one drive available.
258071
U can use a cloning software... I use Acronis backup... or if u r doing a clean install u will need ur original disks and take out ur old drive and put that one in and run the install of ur OS
1089816
I can only tell you about my experience - I was in the process of transferring files to the drive. The transfer stopped about an hour in, and my system no longer recognized the drive's existence. Rebooting did not help. I also tried the drive on other computers, and they failed to recognize the drive also. The return process was fairly painless and my refund was processed very quickly.
1388626
I actually had a bad drive that because of the simplicity of this device I popped in to see if I would have any better luck reading. The answer was no it behaved like you expected any hard drive to act installed in your system. It has no error correction capabilities any different than an internal hard drive on your system. If error correction could/or would be possible it would have to be something running/installed in your O/S
1658442
Yes, typically when installing a new operating system a clean install is recommended. Just backup all your important files/docs before because a clean install will of course clean your hard drive of all files!
308964
Me too! I'm not going to seriously consider purchasing anything computer related unless I see the manual that goes with it. Is it (i.e., Canvio) truly plug and play? Can you selectively choose individual files to back up? I'm not at all interested in wasting time and space backing up files that I really don't wish to back up. (I only wish to back up photographs.) Filtering through all the comments, while helpful writ large, takes a lot of time when looking for particular information. A manual please.
728464
It does create a complete clone. I have deleted everything on my HD and then restored the OS and data. I don't believe you can use it as a C drive but, it will format a new drive to look like your old one.
743095
I transferred about 80 gigs from my old hard drive to my new laptop without any issues. I can't see you having a problem other than waiting longer for a terabyte to transfer.
186568
I personally found Actonis to be significantly less than useful. Was a poor purchase decision. As far as migration / upgrade of HDD size or types, I simply used windows back-up to create an image on my 3TB external Seagate HDD and a recovery DVD set. Then I did my drive swap, made sure my PC had the DVD as an alternate boot drive and then booted from the recovery DVDs. Piece of cake, albeit a lengthy process.
1436664
Sorry to tell you, yeah it's a bad drive. These aren't official Microsoft hard drives, so sometimes they won't work. Try returning it. Mine works pretty nice, but had I known that it wasn't actually produced by Microsoft, I wouldn't have bought it.
1551811
software-ul de clonare,transfera tot ce ai pe hdd si instaleaza pe ssd!nimic in plus sau minus!cloning software, transfer all of the hdd and install the ssd!nothing more or less!
1940478
Yes, works perfectly. No additional equipment needed for the drive itself, but for data transfer from your existing hard drive you'll need a dock or drive case. The startech.com dock works great but I'm sure there are other options which might be cheaper.
1551813
It does a perfect clone of your existing drive. All operating system, applications, settings, keys, passwords and data come over automatically. Keep you r old hard drive as a backup
1485479
This is not a trivial drive swap. There are two different versions of this pc. One ships with a seagate hd and the other with a WD. No telling which one you will get. The seagate has a standard sata interface the wd uses a different connector and getting the sata one is only available in Europe and will cost north of $50. If you buy one with the intention of upgrading the drive make sure it has the seagate. If not return it immediately. Not worth the aggravation and cost. You can clone the drive with Easeus todo backup software. USB boot is disabled I can't find anyone that has identified work around. This is not a trivial drive swap. There are two different versions of this pc. One ships with a seagate hd and the other with a WD. No telling which one you will get. The seagate has a standard sata interface the wd uses a different connector and getting the sata one is only available in Europe and will cost north of $50. If you buy one with the intention of upgrading the drive make sure it has the seagate. If not return it immediately. Not worth the aggravation and cost. You can clone the drive with Easeus todo backup software. USB boot is disabled I can't find anyone that has identified... » Read More This is not a trivial drive swap. There are two different versions of this pc. One ships with a seagate hd and the other with a WD. No telling which one you will get. The seagate has a standard sata interface the wd uses a different connector and getting the sata one is only available in Europe and will cost north of $50. If you buy one with the intention of upgrading the drive make sure it has the seagate. If not return it immediately. Not worth the aggravation and cost. You can clone the drive with Easeus todo backup software. USB boot is disabled I can't find anyone that has identified work around. « Show Less