1TB GL 551 -- but only 372 GB shown???

[shragae]

Hello. Just unboxed my brand new GL 551. It is supposed to have 1TB of disk space, but per Windows there is only 372 GB of disk space with less usable. . .

Any clue what is going on? Was I shipped the wrong spec PC or is it something else?

[shragae]

Ah -- mystery solved. For some reason they've segmented the disk into 2 virtual drives -- one is nearly 600 GB. I wish they hadn't done that, but don't feel like reformatting the entire laptop. . .

[hmscott]

shragae wrote:
Ah -- mystery solved. For some reason they've segmented the disk into 2 virtual drives -- one is nearly 600 GB. I wish they hadn't done that, but don't feel like reformatting the entire laptop. . .

shragae, it's the same on the boot drive and 2nd bay drive, if it comes with one.

Be careful to not delete any partitions until you have created an Asus Backtracker USB 3.0 16GB flash recovery drive to preserve for later. Be sure and test a restore against an empty drive - keep your original Asus Windows HDD boot drive out of the laptop when trying the restore.

Asus Backtracker may erase any other USB drives connected when creating the recovery flash drive, so unmount them first.

When doing a restore Asus Backtracker will first re-partition the drives in both bays, effectively erasing them, before it begins the restore - if the flash drive isn't compatible it will fail to restore and you will have blown away both drives - be careful and pull out the original HDD before doing the restore - you only need the new boot drive in the laptop to do the restore.

Here is what the drive partitioning looks like on my G750JH after going through all of this to combine the volumes:



Note, I replaced the 1TB with a Samsung 840 Pro 512GB, and put the 1TB HDD in an external USB 3.0 enclosure.

Have fun 🙂

Once you are sure that the Asus Backtracker USB 3.0 16GB flash drive works for restore, then you can go about deleting the partitions on the boot drive to combine the space into a single C partition on the Bay 1 drive, and a single D or E partition for the Bay 2 drive.

[Ihatemicrosoft]

That is way too complicated for me to deal with. I have no idea what to do with this partitioned drive. If I run out of space on this one, what do I do, just install another OS on the other drive and use that one? Honestly anything more than that is way beyond my level of comprehension. I'm pissed about this partition nonsense, what bologna. I don't have the money to shell out paying a 'professional' to do it for me. It's like they do this stuff on purpose just so we'll spend more money to use the space we already paid for on our machines knowing the majority of us are all technologically ignorant wieners like myself.

[Clintlgm]

Actually most people that purchase Gaming notebooks are pretty switched on. You need to be to deal with powerful equipment.
until you figure it all out. 350 GB is way more than My OS drive a 256 GB with OS and MS Office 2013 Pluse, CS 4, Auto cad, and all kinds of other software I'm not even using half of my 256 GB. You simple need to set up and move your Data, music, games, movies etc. on to your D:\ drive.
There is nothing new about Asus setting up these notebooks with Drive 1 being C:\ and D:\ and 2nd driver E:\ and F:\ its up to you how you install your software and how you set up your default storage location.


Take hmscott advice and create your restore media and insure it is working before you attempt any changing of partitions.
Goggle is your friend on learning how to manage disk and SSD here is one link that might be helpful start. I have found Mini Tool partition wizard quite useful but you do need to understand what your are doing or it can be very serious if you do things wrong.