Asus Model: Q501LA-BBI5T03

yeah im on the 209 bios as well, and its not listed anywhere. would you mind checking yours again, just to make sure it was under the boot menu?

 

Hit F2 during startup to enter BIOS. Under the "SECURITY" tab is an option at the bottom called "Secure Boot" You can enable or disable only. That's the only setting I have on BIOS 209 as well.

 

hmmm this is weird, i wonder if i somehow have a different 209 bios? i took a screenshot of what mine looks like:



is your version different than 2.15.1236?

anyway, i was finally able to install windows 7 on my new ssd. the problem that i thought might be related to secureboot was actually a USB3 driver problem. apparently the windows7 setup doesnt include the drivers normally, they would have to be slipstreamed into the iso. So i just used a sata>usb dvdrom drive, and a windows7 dvd and was able to install right away. most of the windows8 drivers from asus site worked just fine, except for wired ethernet.

just some info in case anybody else is having the same trouble i was.

 

also, maybe a difference in vbios or EC(not sure what those are)?

 

Yep my BIOS version is different than yours. I have 5.0.1032. I didn't update it myself, it came with this version from the factory..Interesting it appears there may be a few different BIOS out there. So everything works on Win 7? I just might downgrade myself. Keep us posted on how stable it runs over the next few days if you don't mind?

.

 

I recently bought this laptop and am trying to upgrade to an ssd. Is there a trick to getting the back casing off? Thanks.

 

Yes...it's can be a challenge. I started at the rear near the battery. I used a credit card style piece of plastic and slowly moved along the edges as I lifted up gently. Once you get that part up, the rest of the cover has clips that need to "pop" up in order to move to the next one. I slid the plastic around releasing each clip until I made it to the front edge. This was the toughest part to remove. The front clips are a bugger. There is nothing attached to the cover so it will come right off upon releasing all the clips. Take your time and move slowly.

 

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a go.

 

As you slide to the next clip, stop when you feel it and pop it up. If you put too much pressure on it, it will snap off.

 

yeah, its working great so far. all the major components are installed and working, but theres still a few unknown devices left.
i might try to figure out what they are later, and see if i can get them installed. the battery life seems to be much better than it was on win8, but im sure thats at least somewhat due to the SSD i just installed.

btw is there any way you can dump your bios and upload it? i updated mine straight from asus site, so its interesting that theres different versions coming from the factory.

 

Thanks, got it to work. Also thanks to everyone who explained the backlit keyboard fix.

 

Has anyone tried the Intel 530 240GB SSD in this laptop?

I put one in my laptop and from a cold boot the drive shows up in the list of SATA drives in the BIOS. But if I try to perform an installation using windows 8.1 it does not show the SSD. The SSD works in an old laptop I have. I've also used both Ubuntu and GParted live and neither show the drive. There is a known reboot issue with this SSD and this laptop has that problem too. But I haven't seen this particular installation issue anywhere else.

 

I love the laptop, I hate the finger-print magnet attribute. Its top/cover and palm rest often show grease spots from my fingers (I can wash my hands only so frequently).

Anyone have solutions to reduce this? Any recommended skins?

Zagg sells the pricey $40 top+wrist rest screen protector (click on "No Screen" option). I have used Zagg many years ago and didn't like the orange-peel effect on my phone screen then, but that might not matter here since I wouldn't be using it over the screen.

How do you handle finger prints?

 

I have a problem with the same SSD. I tried doing a clean install with Win 8 Pro twice, I tried using Intel's cloning software (Acronis variant), after the install and boot up in Windows the laptop locks up after a minute or less. I am going to try one of my Crucial M4 drives tonight and will let you know if the problem persists.

 

I had the same lock up issue after boot up. The only way I could get it to clone was on another machine. After putting the cloned SSD in my Q501LA it would get past the login screen then the disk activity light stayed solid for several seconds then it crashed shortly after...

Some good news is that I bought a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD and it's working great so far tonight. Did your Crucial M4 work for you?

 

The Crucial M4 works great, I managed to do a clean install of Windows 8 and upgraged to 8.1 with no problems at all. The Intel drive is working fine in my custom desktop. Go figure!

 

After using this laptop for 2 weeks, I think I'm going to have to return it.
- The screen is perfect.
- The battery life is astonishing! Almost 7.5 hours with power set to "Power Saver", with the wifi and Bluetooth off, and the screen at about 25%. All I did was Word and Excel with some powerpoint.
- The keyboard is amazing. Mine has a very clicky sound to it, similar to the old keyboards before everything went Chiclet.
- It is 15 inches, yet it is portable. Heavy, but I can manage it.

The only downside to it is the touchpad. It isn't as responsive as I'd like. The Asus gesture crapware isn't customizable. Yes, you can change the settings, but it isn't as indepth as a Synaptics touchpad. I can't change the sensitivity. There is no edge scrolling, no chiral scrolling, no corner taps to launch various customizable features. Can't use the MacHater's Mod TwoFingerScroll so I can have customized 1+1 tap, 2+1 tap, and 3 finger tap.

Is there a similar laptop out there at this price point with a synaptics touchpad?

 

It's Elantech touchpad and it can never outperform a Synaptics, but it can do pretty well if set correctly.
Try updating the touchpad driver to the newest version.
Elantech 11.13.4.4 touchpad driver

Be sure to remove the existing driver first, reboot, and then install the new one.

 

This may be the most frustrating re-install/upgrade I've ever had. I'm trying to move everything to a 240GB SSD (M500) from the 750GB spinner, and nothing I seem to do is working. Tried a simple clone with Apricorn, but the resultant clone wouldn't boot with the modified partitions. Then I figured I'd just re-install from the USB recovery, just like I did a week ago on my Sony Flip - only to find that you CAN'T actually re-install from the USB recovery drive, only "repair" an existing installation (which it apparently still can't do after the Apricorn clone). is up with that?

So next I figured I'd outsmart this thing and install W8 from a generic ISO image. Easy, right? Nope, in the standard (windows official, from microsoft.com) ISO, there is apparently a missing driver, and putting all the driver inf files into a single directory (no idea which driver is missing, and Win doesn't elaborate on what it is) just sends the program into an endless loop. Yeah, but I've got an ace - a commercial Win 8 Pro USB from Microsoft. Now, I don't want to put pro on this machine, but I will if it will get me moving again. Guess what - the USB drive won't boot in the machine; it's not even recognized by the BIOS as bootable. Nice.

So I'm back to the USB recovery...maybe from an image? Well, to get an image, you have to write an image to an NTFS partition. Guess what ASUS formats the USB recovery drive with? Yup, FAT. Even when I write it to a second flash drive, the restore process seems to choke without the partitions pre-installed.

I know the last 20GB partition is recovery...anybody know what the second-to-last 350MB partition is, or how the two last partitions are formatted (FAT/32? NTFS?)

Update: successful clone of all partitions leads to...boot failure, with the "drive locked" error preventing all recovery options from the USB recovery drive.

Update 2: and now trying a clean install results in the SSD not found (which was the driver it was looking for earlier; I can get past that by feeding it the Intel MB SATA driver, but still no joy on finding the SSD.)

Update 3: I'm about to give up...every time windows "repairs" the installation, the SSD disappears entirely from the BIOS. I can only bring it back by calling it up on a second computer or through a USB-SATA cable.

 

You can edit the usb drive to change which edition it installs or make it give a selection when installing.

The other option is to burn a dvd instead.

Make sure your hdd controller is in the right mode and you are installing the right driver.

 

I've pretty much given up. Tried just about everything I know, including attempting to recover on another machine that recognizes the SSD drive during install (failed: must recover under same BIOS as the recovery was made) and even trying a known-good HDD (again, not recognized during install or recovery). There was only one setting in the BIOS - ACHI. The drives just disappear from BIOS (Actually, the 500GB Momentus never even showed up). Actually, the external DVD drive also was not recognized by the BIOS as a boot option.

Oh well, it's my mother's computer...she'll probably never notice that it's slower than it could be. Poor old girl's been working with a 7 year old Dell that was not state of the art when it was brand new; this should seem like lightning in comparison.

 

@Kevin
Thanks! I thought it was a generic asus touchpad since the driver provided by asus is "Asus". I found an Elantech driver, and that one fixed the responsiveness. I also uninstalled the Asus Gesture, but after installing the Elantech driver, the Asus Gesture came back. No idea how. Thanks again!

@Overzeetop
I used Rufus to make a bootable usb drive. Other than that, I have never switched HDD/SSD on a windows 8 machine, sorry. Here is the settings I used for rufus:

 

So, I love this laptop. I moved from 30 years of Macs to tis laptop and installed many distros of Linux, finally settling on Kubuntu (in fairness, the build quality of the Q501 is nowhere near the Macs, but it is 1/4 the price and the screen ROCKS).

Has anyone installed Linux? And if so, did you lose the ability to control the screen brightness via the keyboard? That is the main downside of the transition to Linux -- and I just can't figure out how to fix it. I've tried all the Linux board solutions, and they don't work.

Apparently, the keys just aren't recognized. Anyway, if anyone has an idea -- please let me know!

Thanks.

 

The EC address for brightness control has to be accessed by Linux, one needs to know the value of enable/disable in it, and program such utility to make it work.
The address is recognized by Windows 7 & Windows 8 since it's part of the OS compliance set in the BIOS.

 

HAve the Q501 and for the life of me can not get an SSD to work with it.
I was able to clone the existing HD to a Crucial M500 256G SSD, with the OEM WIN 8.0
Swapped the drive and on boot screen get a message "unable to start attempting to repair " then it boots to the bios screen.
Tried running the win8 recovery software (created earlier from the OEM ) from a USB drive. repair did not succeed.

Has anybody here, ever been able to clone an the OEM WIN8 image from the mechanical HD to an SSD and able to get it.to run?
Will ASUS tech support help a customer with such task, ever?
Would I be able to recover the OEM win8 software key and attempt a clean install to SSD using the supplied WIN8 key?
I am at the point of giving up on the SSD idea.
Help a fella' out, please.
thanks

 

The OS involves changes in the UEFI BIOS, the legacy type of cloning software failed to clone Win8.
I think only Clonezilla can do the job. Clonezilla - About
However, I would recommend creating the factory recovery discs and use it to restore the OS onto the new SSD that you have.
Use Migrate tool to transfer your settings/documents from the old to the new.

 

Downloaded and installed the latest BIOS and now I have ZERO backlighting on my laptop, plugged or unplugged. My computer also goes dark every time I restart now.

I'm ecstatic..........................

 

My 10 key numberpad did not work out of the box. Do not seem to be having any other problems mentioned, like backlight. Still running windows 8.

Anyone found a remedy for the numberpad?

 

If this laptop is a lower end version of my Q550, what you're talking about is impossible.

There is no way to create recovery discs. The best you can do is create a recovery thumbdrive using the "Create a Recovery Drive" application in Windows 8. But it will not install to a new hard drive. It says that it fails to find the recovery partition, even though the recovery partiion has been copied to the thumbdrive.

 

I see, what's the capacity of your thumb drive?

 

I used a 16GB one

 

the recovery partition reserved on the 750Gb toshiba harddrive in our laptop is 20Gb

 

I installed a Samsung 840 EVO 500GB SSD in my laptop today with no issue. I used the data migration CD that came with the drive. It cloned the existing HD and I then swapped it out. It also included a USB 3 adapter to connect the drive and perform the clone operation prior to the physical swap. I did notice that it only cloned the first two UEFI partitions and the Windows partition. It did not include the ASUS partitions at the end of the drive.

I did create a recovery flash drive, using ASUS BackTracker software, before doing any of the other steps. All in all it was quite easy in my case.

 

This laptop has been giving me problems with randomly rebooting after it has been closed since I got it a couple of weeks ago. I formatted and did a clean install of Windows today, but am now running into driver issues. I was able to update some drivers through device manager and I found the Realtek network one under 'optional updates' in Windows Update. However, some of the drivers in device manager wouldn't update and I can't seem to find drivers for this model on Asus' site or anywhere else online. Does anyone know where I can find drivers?

Thanks in advance.

 

Success!!!! Thank you NAPLESBILL
The samsung migration software works like a charm it is available here for free, click on the link
Linky HERE -->Samsung data migration tool

Now the bad part, the Samsung software will only work with a samsung SSD , it did not recognized my crucial M500 SSD.
I used a Smasung 840PRO 128GB

It did clone tot he samsung SSD quick, swapped the drive it booted right up.
the drive still has a recovery partition 900MB, 100MB EFI partition and the rest is Main C drive. lost the 20GB ASUS recovery partition.

Now that I know it works I need to get me a larger SSD.

Also I can stash the stock Toshiba 750GB mechanical drive with the WIN8.0 on it in case I need it as back up, and I can now try out the new WIN8.1 to see if it is any better then 8.0

thanks again.

 

Charley, I think you may have success using ASUS Backtracker and then restoring to a new SSD drive. I tested the recovery flash drive, made using this utility, and it booted to the flash drive and presented the option to recover to the new drive. I did not proceed as it would have been a fresh install of Windows. This software can be downloaded from ASUS support website.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Continuing my post above...

These are the drivers that won't update.



The only thing that I've noticed, so far, is that the backlit keyboard is no longer lit, not all function keys work (webcam), and the touchpad multi-touch functions do not work.

 

Try 32GB since you can't get anything in between.

 

Found the drivers here:
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download Q501LA

so I no longer need help.


Has anyone tried this laptop with Linux? I'm probably going to dual boot Windows and Debian, will the touchscreen and backlight work with Debian?

 

Why? The Win 8 recovery only took 14gb

Sent from my SPH-L300 using Tapatalk 2

 

Most oem software is locked like that. Having an external usb connector for the right brand can help as you can hook it up temporarily.

 

I was talking to a friend who works for Tiger Direct. He mentioned that the same type utility from Crucial works with any drive and can be freely downloaded.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Post a link to the Crucial disk migration software please if you know where it is.

 

Well, I haven't been able to ask my friend but I did find the crucial migration kit uses the following software:

http://www.apricorn.com/products/software/ezgig.html




Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Does this laptop have a free mSATA slot for an SSD? Searched the thread, didn't turn up anything

 

It has a 2.5 inch mechanical drive that can be removed and replaced with a 2.5" SSD. It does not have a free slot for anything else.

 

Without googling, do you even know what mSATA is?

 

^^^ THIS. When I removed the bottom of mine there was no mSata slot anywhere, not even under the existing HDD. Be careful removing the bottom cover as there are tiny plastic clips that break easily with little pressure.

And yes...I know what an mSATA socket looks like...and no.....I didn't have to Google it.

 

Damn - that's disappointing to hear. Thanks for the confirmation, reps to both of you.

Do you know how tall the HDD that's installed in there is? Is it 7 mm?

 

I didn't pay much attention to the size so I can't be of much help. I just looked in the manual at Asus site and it doesn't even have a service section in the manual like their higher end models do. I no longer own the laptop so I can't measure for you.

This thread states it a 7mm on post #17. Interesting New Notebook from Asus/Review - AnandTech Forums
Rob