Help me understand how Hard Drives bays work in ROG Series?

[Hitchy]

Hello there,

Can somebody please explain how does ASUS UEFI manage the 2 hard drive bays in terms of Boot management?

I explain the situation : i have a ROG G750JW with 2 HD bays. In the bay 1 is installed a stock HDD Hitachi of 750 go and I just added an SSD Sandisk of 250 go in Bay 2. Both are recognised in UEFI and are on AHCI mode.

I managed to install windows 8.1 on the 2nd HD which is the new SSD (bay 2) and I have both windows 8 and windows 8.1 on dual boot (windows 8 is installed on the stock Hitachi on bay 1).

Now why on earth as soon as I remove the Hitachi from bay 1 and try to boot with only the SSD on bay 2 it does not give me boot option as to boot from it? I even tried to enable launch CSM and removed fast boot and secure boot so I can manually set boot priority but even then it only gives me to choose between USB or DVD, no sign of SSD. Even though it is recognised in the UEFI under SATA settings (it shows that the SSD is in the bay).
Same think when I move the SSD from bay 2 to bay 1 : not showing as boot option.....??

Moreover even when both hard drives are installed in the respective bays when I go to UEFI and try to force boot from SSD it does not give me that option it only goes to Hitachi to look for the EFI boot file......

Please help cause I m fighting now for about 10 days (and nights) to try to boot from my SSD with windows on it and still access to my HDD at the same time (i need to that so in the future i would like to completely wipe windows from original Hitachi HD and keep only the OS on SSD)

thanks guys

[Buggsy]

Hitchy wrote:
Hello there,

Can somebody please explain how does ASUS UEFI manage the 2 hard drive bays in terms of Boot management?

I explain the situation : i have a ROG G750JW with 2 HD bays. In the bay 1 is installed a stock HDD Hitachi of 750 go and I just added an SSD Sandisk of 250 go in Bay 2. Both are recognised in UEFI and are on AHCI mode.

I managed to install windows 8.1 on the 2nd HD which is the new SSD (bay 2) and I have both windows 8 and windows 8.1 on dual boot (windows 8 is installed on the stock Hitachi on bay 1).

Now why on earth as soon as I remove the Hitachi from bay 1 and try to boot with only the SSD on bay 2 it does not give me boot option as to boot from it? I even tried to enable launch CSM and removed fast boot and secure boot so I can manually set boot priority but even then it only gives me to choose between USB or DVD, no sign of SSD. Even though it is recognised in the UEFI under SATA settings (it shows that the SSD is in the bay).
Same think when I move the SSD from bay 2 to bay 1 : not showing as boot option.....??

Moreover even when both hard drives are installed in the respective bays when I go to UEFI and try to force boot from SSD it does not give me that option it only goes to Hitachi to look for the EFI boot file......

Please help cause I m fighting now for about 10 days (and nights) to try to boot from my SSD with windows on it and still access to my HDD at the same time (i need to that so in the future i would like to completely wipe windows from original Hitachi HD and keep only the OS on SSD)

thanks guys

It's not too complicated really. Your first hard drive (like the attached picture) has the boot track. Your second hard drive does not. When you dual boot, the boot options are still contained in the boot track on the first hard drive. UEFI requires that partition to boot. What you need to do is remove the old drive first. Then load up your Windows 8 install source. Boot into that, and do a repair. It should allow you to repair the boot partition on that drive. I'm not 100% sure that it'll work in this case, but I think it's your best bet.

[Hitchy]

Thank you so much its clearer now.

Last question is it safe to boot with 2 Hard Drives with same EFI boot option partition? I say this since i intend to clone my HDD to my SSD so at the first boot there will be 2 same EFI on both Hard Drive and i don't know how the UEFI will handle it!

tx

[Buggsy]

Hitchy wrote:
Thank you so much its clearer now.

Last question is it safe to boot with 2 Hard Drives with same EFI boot option partition? I say this since i intend to clone my HDD to my SSD so at the first boot there will be 2 same EFI on both Hard Drive and i don't know how the UEFI will handle it!

tx

I don't think you'll have a problem. Within the BIOS, you'll have two options to pick from to boot to. Just pick the SSD. And as a matter of good practice, you should take this one step further. After the cloning, remove the old drive completely and set it aside. Move the SSD over to the first slot (often this slot is SATA III and the other slot might be SATA II). Now boot the computer up and make sure it's all working. When you are satisfied, shut down and add the old hard drive back into the second slot. Boot up again and this time the laptop should stick with the SSD to boot to. Within Windows, go ahead and delete the partitions and format your old hard drive. It should be obvious as these two drive are vastly different sizes.

One last thought. Check out this thread. It talks about Asus Backtracker. I believe it works for your model. It's a nice backup measure. You could use it to just install Windows 8.1 new on that SSD.
https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?37714-G750JW-adding-a-SSD

[Hitchy]

Thank you my friend for your help!

In fact I already succeeded in cloning my HDD to my SSD using EASEUS Partition Master by just migrating my OS (Windows 😎 to my SSD (since I had too much Data on my HDD I couldn't move too much to my small SSD). And it worked like a charm, I will explain step by step in my other thread over here how I ve done it so people in the same mess as me would do it easily (I spent a whole week figuring it out).

For now i will keep windows folder in the HDD but i deleted the partition with the EFI so it won't create any conflict with the EFI partition in my SSD (we never know in case something goes wrong I just restore EFI partition from my backup to the HDD, I made one of my HDD using Macrium Reflect)

I did not swap between the SSD and HDD slots since I had a bad experience with it the time I tried (I lost all data on SSD check my other thread for details) but are you sure about the SATA 3 and SATA 2 thing? is it established like this for Asus ROG? Do you think my SSD won't work well if it was on SATA 2?
EDIT : i found this THREAD with a full debate on wheter both HD slots are SATA II or SATA III, i need to test to see if it applies to my G750JW!

Concerning ASUS BACKTRACKER it did not work for me the USB key is not booting i tried sevral times and other keys. I ve read somewhere that I need a 3.0 specific brand of USB key for it to work, I only got 2.0 usb keys, so for me its not worth it and I prefer using Macrium Reflect and EaseUS softwares for backup my system.


Again thank you and I will post shortly in the other thread how I did the thing.

[Hitchy]

I juste checked with HWinfo 64 and thank god both my Slots are SATA III with 6gb 🙂