Asus Recovery CD Issue

With my A8Js's stock 120GB hard drive filling up, I finally decided to put in a shiny new Samsung 320GB hard drive into it. I was going to use the original recovery CDs since it was about time for a fresh install anyways.

Popped in the new drive, made sure it was recognized in the BIOS and then booted the recovery disc. Got as far are the screen with "recovering now..." Then, the disc stopped spinning and no hard drive activity at all. Wait a few minutes before I rebooted it. Tried it several times and still the same thing.

I then booted up my Windows XP disc and was able to get the install process started and got as far as the setting of the time and place before I decided to nuke it. That definately shows the hard drive working properly.

I've tried partitioning it with the Windows XP disc first, using a USB Win98 boot and partitioning it with FDISK first, I've tried getting rid of all the partitions first but nothing. The Asus recovery CD would only go as far as "recovering now..."

I've done a recovery from the CDs before on the stock drive. It would be silly if they made it so that recovery was only possible with the hidden partition present. I've only been able to find another instance of this happening on a French forum but there was no resolution.

After racking my brain for a few hours, I just grabbed a SATA external enclosure to put the new drive in and loaded up Acronis Migrate Easy 7 for cloning. Took only a few minutes to manually manipulate the partition sizes and left it overnight to clone. Installed the new drive this morning and it booted up just fine, all data and partitions intact.

While I got my new drive working, I'd like to know if anyone else has had this problem. Why wouldn't the recovery work? I've upgraded the hard drives of Compaqs, Acers, Toshibas and Sonys and none of them have had this problem.

*Resolution* Having more than 2GB of RAM confuses the Asus recovery CD. I left 1GB in and worked fine.

 

No one but me with this issue?

 

Still looking for help on this.

 

I noticed this last week, but i already had my 320gig in a usb sata caddy.

I partitioned mine before i started, as im sick of incompatible vista.

I ended up putting xp pro on twice, (2 days on and off to get a stable system) (2 seperate installs). anyway xp pro does not run on my F3SV-AP250c due to an incompatible LAN driver which makes the computer freeze, and having to switch off by pressing power for 4 secs.
Hence going to last good configuration on boot up. Asus support told me to get latest driver from asus treiber.com..........still crap driver and doesnt work.

So im now back on vista after using acronis 11, as i cloned hd, with hidden partition, before it all went corrupt etc.

The recovery disc obviously doesnt perform a partitioning sequence.

I did a better job partitioning with xp pro, and then later redid it with acronis true image 11.

 

Isn't there a partition on the original HDD that ensures that recovery is possible using the CD?

 

The hidden partition you're talking about is for rapid reinstall of the OS to factory fresh spec (OS, drivers, everything), without using the recovery CD/DVD (which requires separate driver installs).

As noted by Asusteve, the recovery disc won't repartition the HDD on use; but it was never intended by Asus to do any partitioning, just simply reinstall the OS.

 

A few of the attempts were after I had partitioned the new drive but I don't remember if I had formatted it before popping in the recovery CD. Another time, I used my XP Pro disc to format and actually install to the point of setting up the date and time before I rebooted with the recovery CD. Still, I had the "recovering now..." screen with no progress.

 

The recovery CD will partition the drive in either 1 or 2 partitions, if you ask it to (option: Recover to entire HDD in 1/2 partitions)

I have recovered to non-stock HDDs without problems. (WinXP, V6J)

 

Update!

After giving up running the recovery and using Acronis Migrate Easy to move from my 120GB to the new drive, it was working fine until recently when I started getting strange shutdown errors.

So, today I tried again on doing the recovery. Couldn't do it with either the CD or recovery partition. The CD just stopped at "Recovering Now..." but the recovery partition route showed a bunch of jibberish ending with "Causeway Error 09".

After some searches online and found an old post back from 2002-2003 that gave me an idea. Since I have 1 x 1GB and 1 x 2GB of RAM, I yanked out the Corsair 2GB and left the original Hynix 1GB in the machine. Low and behold, the recovery CD worked. For some reason, the recovery partition didn't work and wound up with some read error in the middle of recovery. I'm not too concerned since I backed up my recovery CDs.

It's recovering now. Will have to run memtest on the RAM to see if it's bad.

 

Hmm. This may be because of the bug that prevents the GPU from being recognized in some WinXP systems with 3GB of RAM. The recovery scripts may get confused when they find no GPU to install a GPU driver for...

 

Oh? That's new to me. I just finished running Memtest will all 3GB and nothing wrong with 1 pass of testing.

Hope my experience will help others with the same problem.

 

Yes, that issue happens. But I have only had it on clean installs, not recoveries. Then again, on my 3GB system I only did clean installs.

There's nothing against the issue popping up during a recovery, though.

 

I confirm that having more than 2GB of ram will confuse the asus recovery cd -- hangs on "recovering now", had the problem in a F3Jp and fixed it by leaving just one 2GB stick in. Thanks for the hint!

 

Good to know.