Bought a 3 month old G750JM off Craigslist - Need help. Drive totally wiped/corrupted

[baschulz1]

Hey peeps,

Well.....I sold my G73 on CL for $600 and the same day found a G750JM for $550! The rig was purchased in March from Best Buy. Kid gave me the receipt. It looks mint, not a scratch on it! He needed the cash for some type of certifications he was taking so was in a bind to get rid of it. After talking to him for a bit it was apparent that he NO CLUE about laptops or computers in general. And I mean no clue.

So....let's get to the bad part. Basically....right before we planned to meet, he said he did a "Reset" and manually shut the laptop down when it displayed he was at 40%. because he "didn't want to be late"....I know....like I mentioned earlier, not the sharpest tool in the shed. So after getting this information out of him, which mind you, was some of the most unintelligent jargon I have ever had the pleasure listening to, I came home only to boot an attempting to repair Windows 8.1 that would run for quite some time and then error out that WIndows could not be repaired.

Then enters me....who has limited knowledge about Partitions and formatting drives and definitely doesn't eff with BIOS's and CMD prompts + Shift + F6 x: commands.

I read up a bit, wiped s bunch a chit and probably did more harm than good! Haha.

No basically I'm booting in UEFI DVD as first boot (for the Windows 8 retail OS I have with key) then I have the Toshiba SATA as second boot. Fast boot disabled...in IDE mode.

What happens is...it comes to the Windows Language screen and I press Shift + F10 and then run CMDS: DISKPART, LIST DISK. Then I see Only Disk 0 status Online 931GB Free 0B and GPT has an asterix under it.

SELECT DISK 0
CLEAN
CONVERT MBR

I go through the screens then see 1 entry for drive 0 and it's allocated. I click next. Windows sticks at 0% then errors out with "Windows could not format a partition selected on disk 0. The error occurred while preparing the partition selected for installation. Error code: 0x80070057

Where did I go wrong?

I have the Toshiba Drivers on a thumb drive as well as most of the latest drivers loaded from Asus's site.

I know OEM comes with 4 partitions. A recovery (GONE) A System file (GONE) A Primary and restore or something.

Should I change to AHCI? I think I tried that actually.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
UPDATE:

Sooo......My friend brought over this Intel 520 series SSD 120GB 6Gb/s 2.5" and I'm very new the HDD's in general let alone a SSD.

I'd like to tackle this and learn a lot and get this thing running right rather than RMA it, but if you suggest I RMA it then I guess I can fork it over for a month.

Basically, I'd like to know what my best configuration would be and a layman's terms guide on how to achieve it.

I was thinking we put the Win8/8.1 retail DVD OS on the SSD only and the rest of everything (personal files/docs etc) on the 1TB SATA slow-as-chit 5400RPm HDD?? If so, where do we start 🙂

Oh also, where would I want my games installed? The SSD as well? (with the OS)

[Maxter]

baschulz1 wrote:
Do I put the SSD in the same bay that the HDD came in? The one towards the corner of the laptop. Not under the RAM. Drive 0 I believe.

doesn't matter. just make sure it's the only drive in the computer

[RayGobot]

SSD should be in Drive A I believe (the HDD caddy will say 1 or 2, or a or b, I forget exactly)


And It'll be about another 6-7 hours to finish this upload. It's 9 rar files, about 1.5GB each

[baschulz1]

baschulz1 wrote:
Don't I need to format or clear or run a CMD Shift + F10 prompt on the new SSD prior to installing windows? I may need a quick step by step : /

A buddy told me to run this since it's an Intel drive. (which he said was very desirable) Your thoughts?

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=18455

Thanks amigo! I'm somewhat software illiterate and may need some walking through as far as the unpacking and installing process. If they are rar files.....do I simply upload all 9 files then unpack them in order 1 to 9 and then what? Sorry for my ignorance : / Also, are you able to answer my questions here below? I feel like I need to clean and format this used SSD do I not? Hence the Intel Toolkit question and link!

Is there the option to PM on this forum? I can't find it and was going to PM you a few questions. For starters....what BIOS/driver setup is the recovery from? Basically I'll need to know if I need to update some things (BIOS to 206 if that's the latest and most desirable and the latest drivers off of the ASUS site etc) Personally...on my G73, I found the most stable and best driver and BIOS setup was the old school OEM BIOS 204 setup and drivers that come installed from the factory! (So if your recovery is stable then I may just keep it as is 🙂 )

RayGobot wrote:
SSD should be in Drive A I believe (the HDD caddy will say 1 or 2, or a or b, I forget exactly)


And It'll be about another 6-7 hours to finish this upload. It's 9 rar files, about 1.5GB each

Sounds good. I'm taking the HDD out at lunchtime and will check if it's 1 or 2 or a or b etc...One would think that that bay, the one the HDD is installed on is the bay that I want to put my SSD in (it's the bay in the corner, not the bay directly under the RAM.

[RayGobot]

baschulz1 wrote:
Thanks amigo! I'm somewhat software illiterate and may need some walking through as far as the unpacking and installing process. If they are rar files.....do I simply upload all 9 files then unpack them in order 1 to 9 and then what? Sorry for my ignorance : / Also, are you able to answer my questions here below? I feel like I need to clean and format this used SSD do I not? Hence the Intel Toolkit question and link!

Just make sure you have WinRar installed and have all 9 rar files in the same folder. Open the one that says "part01" in the name and then extract it like any other rar file. As long as all the parts are in the same folder, it should unpack properly into one file.

Once you restore the image onto a usb stick, boot into it by pressing (I believe F12) at boot, and then selecting the USB drive in the boot menu. During recovery, it will format the drives.

baschulz1 wrote:
Is there the option to PM on this forum? I can't find it and was going to PM you a few questions. For starters....what BIOS/driver setup is the recovery from? Basically I'll need to know if I need to update some things (BIOS to 206 if that's the latest and most desirable and the latest drivers off of the ASUS site etc) Personally...on my G73, I found the most stable and best driver and BIOS setup was the old school OEM BIOS 204 setup and drivers that come installed from the factory! (So if your recovery is stable then I may just keep it as is 🙂 )

To send a PM, click on my username (or anyone's) and once their profile opens, under the left menu, select "Send Private Message"
.

As for my system settings. My Bios is v205 (factory default).

I had made the recovery drive from a fresh install of Windows 8 after the 8.1 update, but I don't believe this will make a difference, as the recovery partition is for Windows 8, and the drivers will be the original versions shipped with the laptop.


My default laptop specs are:

17.3" display
2x 1TB HDD*
16GB RAM
GTX 860m

* The only thing I could think of that MIGHT cause a problem, is when you do a system recovery, it formats and partitions the drives. I don't know if this is specific to the original drives shipped with the computer or not. So I'm not sure if it will work properly being installed to a smaller SSD. But there's only one way to find out 😉

TIP: USE A USB3.0 FLASH DRIVE IF YOU HAVE ONE! IT WILL MAKE EVERYTHING GO SO MUCH FASTER!



HERE IS THE LINK TO DOWNLOAD G750JM RECOVERY IMAGE.


Edit: I just noticed the the file says G750JW. THIS IS WRONG! It is more defiantly for a G750JM. My mind was elsewhere when I made the file name.

I'll probably end up recreating the image and uploading it. But this will work regardless of the filename.

[baschulz1]

I feel like an idiot even asking this.....but I don't see an option to download the rar's to my flashdrive? It keeps going to my browsers download location (my desktop). Even though I changed the download location in firefox to I: (the flashdrive)

What am I missing...?

Can I download them to my desktop then extract/unzip them to my I: (flashdrive) Is that ideal?

Also what's the USB Image Tool and md5 image? I wish there was some way to set it to download all 9 one after another as I'm doing this at work and will be leaving for the night soon.

[Maxter]

baschulz1 wrote:
I feel like an idiot even asking this.....but I don't see an option to download the rar's to my flashdrive? It keeps going to my browsers download location (my desktop). Even though I changed the download location in firefox to I: (the flashdrive)

What am I missing...?

Can I download them to my desktop then extract/unzip them to my I: (flashdrive) Is that ideal?

Also what's the USB Image Tool and md5 image? I wish there was some way to set it to download all 9 one after another as I'm doing this at work and will be leaving for the night soon.

Yeah. Extract into desktop folder, unRAR, then you need to copy the image into the flash drive. It's not as simple as drag and drop. You have to use the software and sort of "decompress" it into the flash drive. The image might be on IMG or ISO extension (or other).

[baschulz1]

Thanks for the quick reply. Im at 7% @350kb/s on the first 1.5GB rar.

I'm downloading individually as they finish rather than having 5 going on at once. That's a good idea right? Not sure how bandwidth works and this stuff

[RayGobot]

baschulz1 wrote:
Thanks for the quick reply. Im at 7% @350kb/s on the first 1.5GB rar.

I'm downloading individually as they finish rather than having 5 going on at once. That's a good idea right? Not sure how bandwidth works and this stuff

You will download files faster if you do one at a time. The website should do one file at a time in the queue.

[baschulz1]

Gotcha. Thank you again so much. I'll post back tomorrow with my progress.

[baschulz1]

I'm on my connection at home now and I'm getting 2.3Mb/s. When it gets to a new file though, it's hanging on "temporary error, retrying". It's been on there for some time now. Good news is, each rar is breezing through at over 2Mb!