ASUS G75: boot from the 2nd HDD, and disable the 1st one?

[timppu]

Hello

In my ASUS G75, I have two internal 750GB HDDs. The 1st has the pre-installed Win7 that came with the machine, and the second has been there mostly idle storage so far.

However, I'd like to try out the Win8 Preview from Microsoft, without touching my current Win7 installation.But going to BIOS settings, I couldn't quite tell how to achieve what I'd like to do, and also came empty with the G75 eManual.

Basically, I'd like to set the 2nd HDD as the primary bootable device, and possibly also hide (lock) the first HDD completely from the system, just so that I don't accidentally install Win8 over it. I could find an "interface lock"-option only for the second SATA HDD, and SATA ODD (which I presume refers to the DVD-RW drive). I couldn't find it for the first HDD interface.

I don't want to try Win8 in a virtual machine. I'm already doing that in VMWare Player, but I'd like to check a few things when Win8 preview is running natively on this machine (like game performance; some claim Win8 is considerably faster than Win7).

If this fails, is there some other option to try Win8 preview natively? Like installing it on an external USB HDD and boot from that, if that's even possible?

I have done other normal precautions already, like creating the recovery DVDs (even tested that they work), backed up any private data to an external HDD etc.

[GottiBoi55]

I would "dual boot" your laptop, then you have the choice to boot form one or the other. (win7, or win8)
@ POST it will give you the option of booting from the two OS's, usually gives you 30 seconds to make your choice.
you can also set win8 as the "primary drive" to boot from, if you wish.

I going to do that when I get my $14.99 upgrade copy from Microsoft.
I registered for my upgrade copy last month.

Good luck, and enjoy!

[timppu]

GottiBoi55 wrote:
I would "dual boot" your laptop, then you have the choice to boot form one or the other. (win7, or win8)
@ POST it will give you the option of booting from the two OS's, usually gives you 30 seconds to make your choice.
you can also set win8 as the "primary drive" to boot from, if you wish.

I going to do that when I get my $14.99 upgrade copy from Microsoft.
I registered for my upgrade copy last month.

Good luck, and enjoy!

My idea for now was to try to keep both installations completely separate, because I am just testing the Win8 preview and I intended to get rid of the Win8 installation later, at least for now.

Things worked quite well... until things decided to go awry. 🙂 As I booted the Win7 installation today, it complained it needs to repair something. After that Win7 would not boot at all, while the Win8 partition (HDD) still would. And the Win7 partition is now visible from Win8 installation as a D drive.

So, now I am in a process of restoring my Win7 installation from the scratch, and getting rid of the Win8 installation. Writing now from my ASUS Transformer tablet (with a keyboard). Enough experimenting for now. Thank god I created the ASUS Win7 recovery disks earlier (recovery partition is useless as I cannot boot to Win7), and backed up anything important to the external USB HDD. 🙂

Apparently Win8 wanted to take over both HDDs, and tried to "fix" the boot. Whatever.

I might also use the $15 Win8 upgrade option, even though I wouldn't necessarily install Win8 right away, even on the side. I did notice that 3DMark11 gave me around 7% better performance readings in Win8 Preview compared to Win7, but maybe it was just due to all the preloaded trash that is slowing down the Win7 a bit, because when I googled for it, Win7 and Win8 performance should be pretty much identical with games and such. Not to mention I think I was using newer NVidia drivers in Win8.

[Shawnnepc]

timppu wrote:
My idea for now was to try to keep both installations completely separate, because I am just testing the Win8 preview and I intended to get rid of the Win8 installation later, at least for now.

Things worked quite well... until things decided to go awry. 🙂 As I booted the Win7 installation today, it complained it needs to repair something. After that Win7 would not boot at all, while the Win8 partition (HDD) still would. And the Win7 partition is now visible from Win8 installation as a D drive.

So, now I am in a process of restoring my Win7 installation from the scratch, and getting rid of the Win8 installation. Writing now from my ASUS Transformer tablet (with a keyboard). Enough experimenting for now. Thank god I created the ASUS Win7 recovery disks earlier (recovery partition is useless as I cannot boot to Win7), and backed up anything important to the external USB HDD. 🙂

Apparently Win8 wanted to take over both HDDs, and tried to "fix" the boot. Whatever.

I might also use the $15 Win8 upgrade option, even though I wouldn't necessarily install Win8 right away, even on the side. I did notice that 3DMark11 gave me around 7% better performance readings in Win8 Preview compared to Win7, but maybe it was just due to all the preloaded trash that is slowing down the Win7 a bit, because when I googled for it, Win7 and Win8 performance should be pretty much identical with games and such. Not to mention I think I was using newer NVidia drivers in Win8.

I had a similar issue with my G75 and my Desktop.

I mostly stick to Windows 7 now and I have a extra laptop w/ Windows 8 on it so I can assist customers who get stuck with 8