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Excellent drive

I bought this drive to replace my measly 30GB boot drive that came with my Dell. In order to replace your boot drive, you need to MOVE your OS to the new drive, and make it bootable. Simply dragging files won’t do it at all.

After unsuccessfully using Norton Ghost 9 to try to clone my Win XP boot drive, I decided to use the FREE Lifeguard utility that came with the WD drive. Among other tools, it has the ability to image a drive to a WD disk.

It worked on the FIRST TRY!

Here are a couple of hints:
* During the following process, I always had the WD utility disk in my CD-ROM drive. The system would boot to this disk when all else failed. I also made sure the utilities were installed to my old Boot Drive (C:)
* Connect the new WD drive as your SLAVE (your old boot drive should still be a Master).
* Launch the Lifeguard tool, and go to the Set Up Drive option. Tell it you want to make the WD be a NEW BOOT disk (NOT just a drive for additional space), and have it copy over all of your old C: drive.
* Once it completes (can take hours), it says it needs to reboot to finish the job. That scared me to death, since the PC will start up with an old Boot drive as master, and a New Boot drive as a slave. I was terrified it would ruin my registry. I crossed myself a few times and did it. XP booted on my old drive, then the tool re-launched and completed the process.
* At this point, the tool simply says it is finished - and nothing else… I shut down the system, disconnected the old master, configured the new boot drive as a Master, and connected it to the IDE Master. Upon powerup, Win XP came right up! The new Boot Drive automatically came up as C:.
* NOTE: I had a slave drive originally. During the cloning process, I removed it from the system. Once the new drive was configured as a master, I put the slave back, and it came up like nothing happened. It retained the same drive letter as well.

Bottom line: For $150 (after rebate) for a 320GB drive with a very nice toolset, you can’t go wrong. This also would make a nice TIVO upgrade drive for Series2 TIVOs.

Update (2/5/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen. I also found some auctions for this item here.

The featured review for this product, Western Digital WD3200JBRTL Caviar 320 GB PATA Hard Drive Electronics, was written by Brian Fuchs.

The average rating for this item is 4.3 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.