ROG GL552 WITH Samsung 850 SATA III m2 drive is working: Here's How I Did It

[dbodyguru]

I bought a Asus ROG GL552 and I had major issues trying to install a working SSD into the single m2 slot there.

Note, the GL552 and GL752 series (these are NOT the same as the higher end ROG G7552's!) don't support NVMe drives.

You have to have a SATA III m2 drive.

The ACHI m2 SSD versions don't work on this model (at least for some people, I see reports on this forum).

I bought a Samsung 850 PRO 512 SATA III m2 drive and installed that into the m2 drive on the GL552.

It detected this drive just fine. So at least on CANADIAN or AMERICAN versions of the GL552, Sata III m2 seems to be the working m2, not ACHI or NVMe.

However, using the Samsung Migration software to clone the 1 Terabyte default HDD OS installation to the new SSD did clone to the drive, but the drive would not boot a working version of windows 10. When I tried to boot from the new 512 850 EVO m2 SATA III on the GL552, it would boot into windows, but the desktop would flicker every half second and I could not click on anything.

I tried using Partion Magic, EaseUS TO Backup, Samsung Migration -- and every time I could NOT boot to windows properly on the new m2 SSD drive on the GL552.

Finally, I was able to get it working properly by using Macrum Reflect FREE, cloning from the HDD to the 512 Samsung EVO Sata III m2 SSD, switching the boot load order to the new SSD, and walla, it worked perfectly.

SO USE Macrum Reflect to Clone from your HDD to your SSD if you have the GL552 and you bought a Samsung 850 m2 SATA 3 SSD and you want to boot your OS from the SSD. The OTHER clone software did NOT produce a working installtion from me.

[ROGKenny]

I'm confused here....can I use Image instead of clone?

So my intention was to Clone the provided 1TB drive to the 256GB SSD, but ignore the drive D:, which Asus partition as 558.18GB.

The partitions on the provided Factory Default 1 TB drive that I wanted to clone are:

260MB (System partition)
499MB (Recovery partition)
371.85GB (Where Windows 10 is installed)

I don't need to clone the below as it's spare/empty:
558.91GB (Leftover space - partition)

I can't clone using Macrium Reflect software because it says not enough space as it wants to clone the partition to partition size. So what can I do to just clone the actual data?

The boot Windows 10 OS uses approx 43GB, so if I can just copy that to my SSD along with the 2 hidden partition I"m set.

P.S. Partition magic maybe can resize drive C: (371.85GB) partition to smaller?

Any ideas would be very helpful.

nandodean wrote:
I followed the steps of the first post, but this is also valid. I used Macrium Reflect. It went everything smooth and soft. Didn't have any problems during the installation. The major issue was to find one screw that fitted the hole with enough outter radius to hold the SSD, but had one at home. Can't understand why Samsung doesn't provide a couple of them.



Don't worry, as long as you don't have occupied more than the SSD capacity, you won't have problems. The image you create of the old HDD must be smaller than the capacity of the SSD. I did it from a 1TB HDD to a 256GB SSD.



This works nice too, definitely. Simply hit ESC when booting for the first time with the SSD with windows, and select the Windows Boot Manager referred to the SSD (it clearly specifies which WBM goes to HDD and which one goes to SSD).

Mine also boots in about 10 seconds. Brutal.

So we can confirm that there's a motherboard in this 552/752 which accepts SATA III in M.2 bays, no matter what's told on the instructions book. If you want info about my motherboard or something like that, tell me how and I'll provide info.

edit; did a test. Sometimes gives more writing speed (3-4k mbps)

Here's the pic

http://i63.tinypic.com/154kiza.png

It's in spanish, so Lectura=Reading, Escritura=Writing, Secuencial=Sequential, Aleatoria=Random

[Clintlgm]

Yes well Macrium will automatically resize your C:\ Partition and D:\ Partitions. However if you want to reduced the size of your Hard drive before the clone or Image Simply use Mini Tool partition Wizard to delete the D:\ partition and shrink your C:\ Partition yourself to the size you want it to be on the SSD. You will need to Clone or Create an Image of your entire Disk all the partition are required except the D:\ the if you created and Image restore it to your SSD. Either way will work there are more steps to the Image. Regardless you should create an Image and have it ready incase of any failure or other catastrophe happens that way no mater what you can get back to where you are now.

If you want it to boot you have to select either Clone disk or Image Disk, this is the only way to insure that you will have a bootable SSD when complete.
If you try selecting partitions bad things can happen. if you understand Partition Magic, partition Wizard is the same thing only modern up to date and better and Free. Partition Magic I don't believe has ever been updated to work with UEFI/GPT systems.

[ROGKenny]

I was hoping that Macrium software would be able clone just the data that is on the partition and not worry about the size of the target partition havkng to be the same size or larger than the source.

[dbodyguru]

ROGKenny wrote:
I was hoping that Macrium software would be able clone just the data that is on the partition and not worry about the size of the target partition havkng to be the same size or larger than the source.

You should be able to do this. I cloned from the 1 TB HDD to the 512 SSD (m2 SATA III Samsung 850 EVO). The 1 TB had about 400 gigs used while the SSD was empty. Macrum Reflect should let you clone to a SMALLER SSD drive than the source drive you are cloning from (in this case, your 1 TB HD) as long as the data is SMALLER than the available data on the SSD.

Macrum ALSO lets you select a specific source PARTITION on the source drive to clone to the new SSD. So you are not stuck having to clone the WHOLE HDD to the SSD -- you can select a partition from the source disk. You can select MULTIPLE partitions from the source drive to clone over -- which is what I did I beleive.

IN my case, I simply selected the OS partition (I think -- I did this 10 days ago, so I can't remember if the GL552 comes out from the factor with the 1 TB hard drive partitioned or not. If it is partioned, you can select the OS partition (and the other supporting partions -- there are sometimes one or two other small partitions that are used for file directory or backup something. SELECT those to clone over a the same time.

[ROGKenny]

[Dbodyguru: thanks for the info.

I am having such a difficult time with this. Maybe there is a setting that I need to do in macrium that I need to set?

My 256GB Samsung EVO should hold the 3 partitions as all the data combined does not exceed 250GB.

System partition
Recovery partition
Windows 10 boot partition.

Even if I choose just the Windows Partition it says my target disk does not have enough space. Essentially, the Windows partition was configured by ASUS to be 380GB, so when attempting to clone that partition to the Samsung 256GB it is too large since Marcium wants to clone the entire partition and not just targeting the actual data which is just a few gigs (Windows 10).

Anyhow let me know if I'm missing something here.

Thanks.

QUOTE=dbodyguru;562427]You should be able to do this. I cloned from the 1 TB HDD to the 512 SSD (m2 SATA III Samsung 850 EVO). The 1 TB had about 400 gigs used while the SSD was empty. Macrum Reflect should let you clone to a SMALLER SSD drive than the source drive you are cloning from (in this case, your 1 TB HD) as long as the data is SMALLER than the available data on the SSD.

Macrum ALSO lets you select a specific source PARTITION on the source drive to clone to the new SSD. So you are not stuck having to clone the WHOLE HDD to the SSD -- you can select a partition from the source disk. You can select MULTIPLE partitions from the source drive to clone over -- which is what I did I beleive.

IN my case, I simply selected the OS partition (I think -- I did this 10 days ago, so I can't remember if the GL552 comes out from the factor with the 1 TB hard drive partitioned or not. If it is partioned, you can select the OS partition (and the other supporting partions -- there are sometimes one or two other small partitions that are used for file directory or backup something. SELECT those to clone over a the same time.

[Clintlgm]

Yes you not copying data, you are cloning an OS Bootable Drive. Unless your an expert at creating UEFI bootable disk, you should Clone the disk to your SSD. If this is too complicated for you perhaps you should visit your local computer shop they be happy to accomplish this for you.
goggle is your friend I found this video for you

[SirWaWa]

so any sataIII m2 80mm will work?

does brand matter? any size limitations?

will battery consumption be lower or noticeable?

[ROGKenny]

Success! Thanks for the video post and help 🙂

WOOHOO. ...This beast now boots fast!

[Clintlgm]

LOL Yea SSD are amazing

[Clintlgm]

We don't know about any brands except Samsung so far, if you try a different brand be sure to post how you got it to install and how its working!!
Battery Consumption compared to what a spinner heck yea no moving parts to a SSD. If your playing with a Gaming notebook don't expect much battery life powerful CPU's And GPU's suck up battery power quickly.