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)

[baschulz1]

Almost done. On 6 of 9 :cool:

Question: After it's loaded to the flashdrive and I'm ready to boot the recovery to the SSD, do I need to F2 into the BIOS and change/choose the boot order to the USB? I think I had it set to boot from the optical first then SATA second. Also....do the settings in the BIOS need to be set back to default? As it stands, unless it got wiped, the BIOS is set to fast boot disabled and IDE with EUI etc

Also, after the Windows install. DO I immediately update to 8.1?

Lastly.....after Windows installs and everything looks good, do I simply plug in the OEM HDD Tohsiba 5400 drive into the open bay and then boot back up and follow these directions (posted by Maxter below)? (open cmd and do a chkdsk)

Thanks again everyone!!!

By Maxter:
"you might only want to install your main 1-3 games on SSD and the rest on HDD (which you can place into the next computer bay once Windows has been installed.
You don't know what's wrong with the original drive until you do a full check. So, install OS on SSD, then open a command line (with administrator privilege) and do "chkdsk /r d:" (I'm assuming the HDD will be drive "D". Let it do its thing (probably 30 mins).

[RayGobot]

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.

By default, the Mega extension downloads files to the desktop. You can set files to the download queue by highlighting the files and selecting the first download option.

The md5 file is just an extra file to compare to the original I made. You don't need it, it's more for the really technical people, I just put it there in case someone needed it.


You will need to download all the rar part files into the SAME location. And then open the frist one and a file will be extracted from them. It's name will be "G750JW_RECOVERY_IMAGE.img" (Note the name is wrong, it's for a G750JM)

THIS FILE WILL BE 14.6GB in size

Next you will need to connect your empty flash drive to your computer and download and run the USB Image Tool.

In the program, highlight your USB Flash Drive and click on "restore" and browse to where the recovery image file is located and click Open. It should start copying the image to your drive.

Once it's finished, you should have a USB drive called "RECOVERYHDD" mounted on your PC.

Take this USB stick and connect it to your laptop and boot from it and follow the on screen instructions.

[baschulz1]

Thank you. Perfect. I'm a moron.

Is there any way to set them to keep downloading after each finishes? I'd rather leave em and come back in a few hours.

[Maxter]

You don't really need to go into BIOS change anything. If no OS is detected it'll automatically go into the DVD (there is nothing), then the USB drive and catch the installation. After you install and start the OS, the Windows key will be read from your MoBo. Activate windows. Download all drivers for Win 8.1 from the suport.asus.com website. Upgrade to Win8.1. Install the drivers you downloaded. Add the HDD to the other bay. I recommend you put the SSD on the bay that is recognized as Port 0, and the HDD on the other Bay which is recognized on Port 1,2,3 or 4 - doesn't matter as long as it's not Port 0. Port 0 is the port for OS, usually (on mine, Port 0 = Bay B and Port 4 = Bay A, weird I know...).
When you plug the HDD it automatically will detect, install drivers and you are set. I recommend that you do a full wipe (return all cylinders to value of 0). You can use the CCleaner program from Piriform; it's free. After this is done, do a chkdsk /R d: (it'll take about 45-60 mins)

[RayGobot]

I think this is getting more complicated than it should be...

Install your SSD in bay B and HDD in bay A, boot your from your USB stick (Press ESC at boot, and select the USB drive) and then follow the on screen instructions. The recovery will format all drives and install the OS. It will reboot, into Windows and once you've gone through the setup, browse the recovery USB and browse to eSupport->eDriver and run AsInsWiz.exe and it will guide you through the installation of the laptop drivers and applications.

Then you can run Windows update and update your system (There will be a bunch of initial updates (few hundred MB) and then after those are installed, you should be able to install the 8.1 update.

[baschulz1]

Houston.....we have success.:rolleyes:

The rig is up and running flawlessly! 🙂 8.1 with the most current updates. I'm installing my steam account and downloading Origins now. I made sure the Nvidia card is set for default for all applications. Can't thank the both of you enough. RayGobot if you're ever in Arizona I owe ya a cold one.

Last question, with this factory 1TB HDD. Can I simply install it in the other bay and then when I boot, windows will identify it as just another drive? I assume it will be drive D. When I swapped the Intel SSD in, I put it in the same bay as the HDD came out of. The bay in the corner of the laptop. It displays as drive C.

Is there any formatting etc that needs to be done with this HDD swap back or simply plug and play? If you remember, I believe that drive was left off at either totally unformatted or Only a single partition created but not sure whether it's MBR or GPT

[RayGobot]

baschulz1 wrote:
Houston.....we have success.:rolleyes:

The rig is up and running flawlessly! 🙂 8.1 with the most current updates. I'm installing my steam account and downloading Origins now. I made sure the Nvidia card is set for default for all applications. Can't thank the both of you enough. RayGobot if you're ever in Arizona I owe ya a cold one.

Awesome! I'm glad things worked!!! (And now we know for anyone else who has the same question!

I don't know when I plan on going to Arizona, I like Canada quite a bit. But feel free to add me on steam. Username is poopdedoop

baschulz1 wrote:
Last question, with this factory 1TB HDD. Can I simply install it in the other bay and then when I boot, windows will identify it as just another drive? I assume it will be drive D. When I swapped the Intel SSD in, I put it in the same bay as the HDD came out of. The bay in the corner of the laptop. It displays as drive C.

Is there any formatting etc that needs to be done with this HDD swap back or simply plug and play? If you remember, I believe that drive was left off at either totally unformatted or Only a single partition created but not sure whether it's MBR or GPT

If it's formatted in a way that Windows will recognize it, then it'll just show up as an additional drive most likely D. If it isn't formatted, then you will need to format it in Disk Management.

If there's nothing on the drive you need, I'd just do a fresh format anyways, you can remove any additional partitions that may be on the drive that aren't needed.