I've spent over three days trying to transfer the contents of 20 GB drive to new 40 GB drive on my Inspiron 4000. I'm using Apricorn's EZ-GIG which includes a PCMCIA IDE/ATAPI card with a cable that attaches to the secondary drive. After spending several hours on phones and getting new hardware shipped, I'm getting errors that they've said they've never seen. After jumping through several diagnostic hoops, I'm left thinking that the problem lies somewhere else than in their hardware/software.

One of the symptoms that we see is that their software (not running in Windows mode) cannot read Sector 0 of either the old hard disk or the new hard disk. It doesn't matter which configuration (old drive internal-new drive external/old drive external-new drive internal), the same error occurs. This is preventing the master boot record from being copied correctly.

One could assume that the old drive's sector 0 is readable if it can be a bootable device, so I'm wondering if there are any known issues with the BIOS that intercept calls here? Currently running version A23.

Your input greatly appreciated!

 

--Evan