Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Update: It seems that F9 makes the bios restore the MBR to the original one that doesn't detect other drives so I've changed that step to use F11 instead. On that note, if you accidentally press F9 and make it restore the MBR, it'd be a good idea to run the TeraByte tool again to reapply the other MBR.
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Hi. After spending the past few days on this, I figured I'd share the results of my research since it seems there were others who were interested in doing the same.
Disclaimer: If things turn out bad, you'll likely have to use other tools to get back into your system. Do at your own risk or better yet, don't do it if you can't handle worst case scenarios. I'm also horrid at writing guides, so perhaps someone can clean this up.
Premise: Like most people here, I purchased a SSD after getting my G73JW-XT1. As I did not receive a recovery disc with my notebook, I decided to see if I could go about using the AI recovery discs with the SSD. Did not work. After understanding how the recovery partition (and the ASUS utilities) works, I decided to set it up so I can just make the recovery partition software recover to my SSD which seems like an ideal solution for me. Although 20 gigs are still wasted on the partition, at least they're wasted on the larger drive instead of my SSD.
Benefits:
ExpressGate software is intact.
As long as I prep the HD properly, I can replace the OS drive and recover with minimal effort.
I can modify the recovery image to whatever.
I can restore to the stock configuration if I ever have to give this laptop to someone else.
A clean install becomes an option instead of a necessity whenever I want to change the OS drive.
Guide:
In order to minimize the amount of changes necessary and to retain the instant-on functionality of ExpressGate, I kept the original HDD in the same spot and placed my SSD into the secondary bay. Looking at the BCD, there may be issues with the SSD in the primary bay.
Next, changes to the recovery image will be necessary. In order to access the recovery partition, you can use diskpart or another partitioning tool (I used MiniTool Partition Wizard) to remove the hidden attribute from the recovery partition and then assign a drive letter to it using the Disk Management tool (diskmgmt.msc).
The reason that a modification to the recovery image is necessary is because of the drive associations. If you use the recovery image on your SSD, it'll be assigned a drive letter that isn't C which will break the first-load setup among many other things since it is expecting your files to be in C.
In order to modify the image, you need a tool called ImageX and the WIM FS Filter driver which can be acquired by installing the WAIK or just using google to find it (WAIK is I think 1 gig+ while just what is necessary is a few megs. I think there's also legal issues posting/linking the driver package.). After installing the filter driver, you have to combine and mount the recovery image.
There's a copy of ImageX on the recovery partition so you can just use that for the next step. Open the command prompt (in Administrator mode) and go to the recovery partition drive. To combine the image, type
imagex /ref asus2.wim /ref asus3.wim /export asus.swm 1 c:\asus.wim
The combined image won't fit in the recovery partition so you could throw it into a place that has ~12G of space free so c:\ could be replaced with any other path that could hold the image.
After that, for convenience, throw a copy of ImageX and the wim file into a folder and make another folder in there (doesn't matter the name). The file is to be mounted into a folder so changes can be made.
imagex /mountrw asus.wim 1 mnt
mnt can be replaced with whatever you named the folder. There is only one necessary change to be made and that is located in mnt\Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM. Open up regedit, click on the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE entry and then do File->Load Hive. Open up the previously mentioned SYSTEM file and put in whatever as a name. Once inside, go to MountedDevices and delete all entries that start with \DosDevices\ (in my case, it was \DosDevices\C: \DosDevices\D: \DosDevices \E. Unload the hive and you're done with that. The reason for removing those entries is because Windows will restore them upon boot with the drive it is booting off of defaulting to C.
Afterwards, commit the changes to the image file by typing.
imagex /unmount mnt /commit
Again, replace mnt with whatever you named the folder.
Now to resplit the images.
imagex /check /split asus.wim asus.swm 3900
After the images are split, you can use the resulting swm files to overwrite the ones in the recovery partition. If you want to be safe, you can back up the old ones. Use your paritioning tool to set the recovery partition to hidden. You're done with that.
With that done, now you can prep the soon-to-be OS drive. Create a partition on the new drive and call it OS. The recovery paritition software will look for a drive with that label so it's important it is called OS.
Naturally, since there are now two drives with the OS label, you'd want to change the OS label of the previous OS drive so the software doesn't pick it up.
We're almost done. The way the recovery partition works is that the drive has a custom mbr so when F9 is pressed, it unhides the drive, sets it to active, and then boots off of it. The problem is that for some reason, when that behavior is triggered, the recovery software won't recognize the other drives on the system so the best option is to replace the mbr with a better one. Download TeraByte Unlimited's MBR Utility ( http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads/mbr.zip) and extract to some folder.
Assuming that your stock HDD is still in the primary bay, you can just type
mbr 0 /install selm 1 11 "Press F11 to start Recovery" 0xC 0x1C
That will install a mbr that does exactly what the original ASUS one did. You can replace 1 with a larger number for a longer delay or put some other message between the "".
If everything is done correctly, you should be able to F9 boot into the recovery partition and then recover to your secondary drive. In my case, there was only one option available "Recover to entire HD" or something like that.
After the recovery finishes and it reboots, press ESC and have it boot to the secondary drive. It should go through the setup process and not break. The only change I had to do afterwards was fix the System Recovery feature and disable recovery for a drive that no longer existed and set it to protect the new OS drive.
If all went well, you can backup your necessary files and then format the old OS partition. In my case, the stock drive has my recovery partition and my data partition while my new drive has my OS partition. Because there is no longer an OS on the stock drive, when the timer for the F9 behavior times out, it'll boot from my new OS partition.
A point of interest- For some reason, the behavior to reset the active flag on partition 1 of drive 0 no longer works so none of the partitions on drive 0 will have the active flag set. This is only a problem if there is another OS installed on that drive.
It is to my understanding that the recovery software just looks for a partition named OS so setting it up to recover to the stock HDD is just a matter of naming a partitition OS on that drive.
Anyways, I hope this information is useful to anyone else who is interested in keeping their recovery partition and wanting to upgrade their drive. If it is really useful, perhaps someone can rewrite it and make it more fit for general consumption. Sorry if I have a step wrong or missing somewhere, just let me know and I'll make the proper corrections. I just started typing this up after I finished recovering my system.
Guide: How to use the recovery partition to recover to another drive.
Discussion in 'ASUS Gaming Notebook Forum' started by Laxidman, Dec 27, 2010.
