G46 HDD Replacement?

[City_Builder]

Hi,

One of my laptops is the Asus g46
It's got one hell of a slow hard drive and I believe it's only a 5400 RPM drive so I want to replace it with a 7200 RPM drive that I have.

My question is, do I seriously have to disassemble the entire laptop to replace the HDD?

On my G74, I only have to open the door on the back and remove 4 screws, but the video I watched seemed to suggest that I've got to actually split the laptop in half, remove the screen etc to get to the hard drive. That seems absurd to me so thought I'd ask here where people would know.

Thanks

[SpasTaz0917]

I must say I feel sorry for you...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOvXRuB9bsc

but the wifi card looks very accessible!

[City_Builder]

Damn. Yeah that's the same guy that I watched his video disassembling the laptop. Maybe I'll just wait until really large SSD drives are more affordable as I don't want to put in the 7200 RPM only to find out that it doesn't make as much of a difference as I think it should and have to do it all over again with an SSD to try to get good performance out of this "thing".

I was really hoping there was an easier way. This is just crazy to do all that to replace a HDD that should have been a 7200 RPM to begin with (IMHO)

[Clintlgm]

Well 500 or so GB SSD are available now. I still find that a fairly good size hard drive. and you can take your current hard drive and put it in a external USB 3.0 case it will run just about as fast as it did internally, Keep your less used stuff on the external. The SSD will blow your mind fast. About 4x as fast a any 7200 or 10,000 RPM hard drives.

[SpasTaz0917]

there's a mSata port 😉
so you could just slap a 120gb mSata in there while using the regular HDD for storage and programs 🙂

so you can use the Internal sata harddrive while having the mSata SSD.
so it's a win 🙂


kinda sad the G75's don't have a mSata port :'(

[Pitcher1]

i think if you want to change HDD just open back cover and careful to unplug two cabes, you can unplug HDD.

[panosbob]

Is there any kind of professional that could do this ? Because i really want to upgrade to a ssd but i can not go into that process .
i'll surely destroy it.

[Clintlgm]

What you want to look for is a Certified Asus Repair station. They can do this for you with out voiding you warranty. You can also check with the custom shops that sell Custom Asus computer they also can do this for you without voiding your warranty.

Maybe this one http://www.xoticpc.com/
or http://www.hidevolution.com/new-laptops/asus-g46vw-bsi5n06-2gb-nvidia-gtx-660m-14.html

I don't know if they'll do custom work or not but they both have good reputations
I wouldn't send it to ASUS Repair to have it done.

[City_Builder]

Okay so I did this, this morning about 4 AM. Without rewatching the youtube video I simply went for it.

It was easy peasy. The only stumbling block that I had was figuring out where a couple of the screws were that were hiding from me (lol).

Turned out that 2 of them are in the RAM compartment, 2 of them are under the rear rubber foot pegs and 2 more are behind the screen under the plastic cover.

Anyway, once I got all the screws out and thus removed the rear plastic cover behind the screen (no the screen does not physically need to be removed to replace the HDD or the battery as it turns out), it then became really simple to split the case using an old credit card. Don't use a screwdriver to try to do it as you WILL mar the edges of where the case splits in half, the plastic is actually quite soft.

Anyway, it took me about 2 hours to split the case, put in the new HDD and put it back together, that was with being quite lazy, smoking a few cigarettes and having a couple cups of coffee.

I'm now in the process of making a bootable windows 8 flash drive using the Microsoft tool to make it easier. I wanted to put Win 7 on it but I'm pretty sure that Asus doesn't have all the necessary drivers and or software to use this laptop under Windows 7 unfortunately.

Anyway, it was rather simple straight forward process but if you do not feel comfortable doing it, then take it to a computer repair shop that is reputable in your area.

I will not hesitate to do it again when I can find an affordable, really large SSD to replace the 7200 RPM that I just installed in it.

I was actually a little disappointed that I was correct that the HDD that came with this G46 is a Seagate 5400 RPM 8MB cache 750 GB HDD.

One would think that Asus would have either put in an SSD or at the very least a 7200 RPM 16MB cache HDD for better performance in one of their "gaming laptops". Oh well, it's got one now.

I have to say though... I suspect that getting Windows 8 on the hard drive will be the hardest part of the whole procedure, as it is now it's not going well. Seems bios is now refusing to boot from the USB thumb drive s I'm formatting it to FAT 32 as suggested in another topic to see if that helps any.

[SpasTaz0917]

create the thumb drive using rufus (google rufus) creates the bootable for you. create UEFI or BIOS

Rufus makes it so easy it's ridiculous 😛