Asus G73JH SSD Frustrations

Hi Guys, if this has been answered earlier, please let me know.. I bought a Crossair P128 SSD. My laptop does not boot without the 500GB hard drive.

I was able to install Windows 7 by setting up the SSD as a secondary drive (left bracket) but i dont see any improvement in performance with this.

I tried with just the SSD on the right bracket and after bios, i am struck with a blinking cursor and it does not go further

Just to check, i removed all hard drives and it boots into the DVD. The moment i put in the SSD, it does not boot.

Current setup :
500GB (Slow HDD) on the right bracket as primary
128GB (Yet to be fast SSD) on the left bracket as secondary

With the current setup, i have Windows installed on the SSD and set it up to boot from the SSD and it is working fine but without much of a difference in performance.

Please help. I called Asus and that guy who nswered my call just kept repeating like an answering machine "Sorry as a company policy, we do not support any upgrades to your laptop"

I just flashed bios to the latest version (211) hoping it might help but no joy

 

I am surprised that you don't notice a difference in performance with windows running on the ssd. Even though it is in the "slave" slot, you should reap the benefits of the faster access times and transfer speeds.

Have you tried modifying the hard drive and disk drive boot/priority order in the BIOS?
I believe that there are two places where you can/must do this. (I installed Windows 7 on a 128gb Crucial SSD several months ago, and it is in the master slot.)

The blinking cursor after the BIOS generally just means that the your computer didn't find any operating system to load.
Have you gone into the BIOS when the SSD is in the "master" slot and the 500gb drive is not in the computer, and made sure that the Corsair is being recognized? If so, you should be able to install windows from a dvd... Have you tried installing windows in this scenario?

Feel free to pm me if you have questions...

 

Did you update chipset drivers? Sometimes for one reason or another they use the oldest chipset driver. Go to Intel and download the latest one. Also make sure your BIOS is up to date.

 

@jacobxaviermason:
1. Yes i have set the boot order correctly to boot from the Crossair
2. Yes, when i had only the SSD in there, i did go to BIOS and set the boot order to boot from DVD as i knew there is no OS on an unpartitioned hard drive.
When this was done, instead of booting from the disk, i get a blinking cursor.
When i remove the SSD (NO HD on the laptop) it boots into the DVD but the moment i put in the SSD (and check that SSD is recognized and set boot order second.) i get the blinking cursor.

@Tsunade_Hime and flores2010:
Thanks upgraded the chipset drivers and i did actually see an improvement. Also i followed instructions on a few threads to relocate the temp folders and then disabled intelppm. Now i notice a difference.

But i would still like to install the SSD as a primary and still boot from it.

 

I'm not sure if this is the issue, but did you install Windows with both drives installed? If you did, then the mechanical HD has the 'boot' partition information that tells Windows how to boot from.

I would suggest you re-install with just your SSD plugged in and see if it fixes your issues.

Hope I'm not too far off track here.

Good luck.

 

When i try to install with just the SSD, it does not even boot into the DVD to start setup

I have checked the boot settings in BIOS.

Its so frustrating. having assembled computers for over a decade now since the days of good old DOS, being unable to install Windows 7 on my personal laptop........

 

Okay, (I did read that correctly then... hmmm)...

Is the SSD in the original slot the HDD was in, or in the secondary slot?

 

I tried both. It just doesnt like the idea of not having that 500GB hard disk in there... i tried all possiblt combinations and finally when i called asus, they said we dont support upgrades.........but there should be a way...... cos ive seen a lot of guys over here having done this.

 

Okay, this may seem like a kludge, but this should work for you:

Clone the 500GB drive to the SSD (it is placing certain files on the drives that mark it as 'Asus approved').

Does that make the SSD show up now? If it does, then I would go ahead and do a clean install at this point.

Make sure that the total space used on the HDD is smaller than the capacity of your SSD, if that doesn't work - well, I would begin to think it is that specific SSD you have that is not compatible with your system.

Good luck.

 

okay so the 500GB thing has a 19GB FAT partition. i will try that onto the SSD. i will need to buy an external hard drive before i could try that.

But i have seen many posts where people say they were able to do a clean install without any issues.......

 

Okay i bought a WD 1TB drive, backed up everything so i wont have a heart attack.

Now, I try all permutations and combinations but still doesn't work!

One point i got into my head now. The asus guy when i called their helpdesk asked me "Did you find two hard drive brackets?" I said No. He said then your laptop is not configured to be upgraded! duh... whats this? some hard wiring in the bios stuff?

 

Did you try to clone the original 500GB HDD to the SSD?

Not copy; clone - there is a difference.

If it does not boot up after a successful cloning - then the SSD is simply not compatible with your notebook.

 

Tried partitioning the SSD and setting the partition to active and quick format it before putting it into the master bay? Shouldn't need to, but who knows what's going on with your bios.

 

Yep. Cant clone it completely though as the HDD that came with the laptop is 500GB and the SSD is 128GB.

I did clone (or rather copy) the first 19GB partition on the 500GB HDD onto the SSD. made sure the starting cluster and stuff were similar.

i did use partitioning tools and made sure i had one partition set to active and primary.

hmmmm now i dont want to go back and buy another SSD to try this. just too expensive..

i have set it up now as a secondary but boot drive

i do see improvements in the performance but still, not happy that you are forced to accept something you didnt want Thanks all of you for your replies. i will keep a look out and will post here if i find a solution.

 

Keep removing enough data/programs until you can clone it completely.

As long as the total capacity of the 500GB drive used is below the total available on the SSD - then cloning should complete.

What you're trying to 'completely' clone is not just the partitions and the (important - boot) data - but also the MBR and any other supporting files your notebook may have.

If you don't let the cloning finish (or it can't - for whatever reason) it won't copy that last important MBR information.

Can you give it one more try?

If nothing else, it should at least boot from the SSD for you (make sure the 500GB HD is not installed at all).

Good luck.

 

I tried but it doesnt clone the other 400 odd GB partition all i get is a message that says the hard disks should be of identical size to clone. Is there a win7 x64 cloning program you could suggest? let me give you the set up i have as of now :

500GB HDD: Set up as the primary hard disk but not booting from this. It has two partitions. One a 19GB Asus partition (FAT) and another for the remaining size "Except" for one 7 MB partition which i saw was unusable. not sure if this is the one that holds the boot data but some of the free partitioning programs i tried wouldnt even recognize it.

SSD : 128GB One partition with windows 7 installed on it. setup as secondary drive and set to boot.

What i have tried in terms of cloning/copying : copied the 19GB partition to the beginning of the SSD and after that, created another partition for the rest of the space.

I couldn't copy/clone the other partitions. And, windows shows the 500GB HDD as having dynamic partitions ( something with a mix of FAT and NTFS ) which one free cloning software refused to even touch saying it does not work with dynamic hard drives.

 

Looks like plenty of people have problems with the Asus G73JH + Corsair P128 combo in other forums too. The only solution one guy found is to enabled an option called "uefi boot" somewhere in the bios. Hope that helps.

 

Interesting... found this another forum post.. i will give this a try... Can't install windows on corsair P128 ssd - General-Storage - Storage

 

A ray of hope finally. Support Question Can't Install Windows 7 on 120gb Vertex Solid 2

That guy was able to do this after a Sanitary Erase on the hard disk.. hmmmm

 

Tried and now i'm tired

UEFI doesn't do the trick. Maybe its something to do with crosair.

 

Try Clonezilla. It boots from CD and runs under its own Linux OS, great cloning software.

I used it to clone a 500GB drive with three partitions (18GB recovery, 100MB boot, and the rest as C onto a 160GB SSD. I defragged the 500 gb drive so I could shrink the C: partition size small enough to fit everything onto the 160. This involved disabling pagefile and system restore points and then deleting them because those system files were right in the middle of the partition I was trying to shrink.

I did this on my Sony but it's worth a shot on the Acer.