How to install Windows 8 on new HD in Asus laptop?

[Throckmorton]

I bought an Asus Q550 laptop from Best Buy and I want to upgrade the HDD to an SSD. Asus provides no software to create recovery DVDs or USB key, so I made a recovery USB key using the Windows "Create a Recovery Drive" application. That's the one that puts your recovery partition onto the USB drive.

But when I put in the SSD and booted up, it didn't give me any option to install onto the new drive. When I tried to do a "reset" it said that the required partition wasn't found. Really? What's the point of putting the recovery data onto the USB key if you still need it on the hard drive? Did Microsoft just not think this through?

Is there some way to make this work? The other option would be to download a Windows 8 image, put it onto the USB key, install fresh, and HOPE I can get the drivers installed properly in the right order. Except there is no way to legally download Windows 8 like there was with Windows 7 and Vista...

It would have been great if ASUS had included software to create recovery media like Sony does. Do they really intend for you to never install a new hard drive? BTW, ASUS doesn't even acknowledge the existence of this laptop and provides no driver downloads or manuals. All I have is what came on the hard drive. Thankfully there is a folder with the drivers.

 

[postmortemIA]

you want it easy way? buy Acronis disk image.
you want it free? get clonezilla.

 

[Throckmorton]

you want it easy way? buy Acronis disk image.
you want it free? get clonezilla.

I don't have an SSD-USB adapter. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure you can't just image the drive. Windows has to be set up for an SSD right? AND my HDD has about 450GB on it, and the new SSD is only 240GB.

Seriously, do I have to buy a new Windows 8 license? That's some BS.

 

[Throckmorton]

Oh wait, I do have a USB-SATA adapter. My Seagate external drive has a back end that pops off and can go onto a bare drive.

I wonder if I can image the recovery partition to the SSD and if that would allow the recovery to work...

 

[Underclocked]

Put your old drive back in the unit and boot it. Use Belarc Advisor or some such tool to tell you your windows key. Write it down in several places. Get an image of 8.1 (several sources of good images). Install ssd. Install 8.1 using the installation key then switch key to your own windows key and activate.

 

[Throckmorton]

Put your old drive back in the unit and boot it. Use Belarc Advisor or some such tool to tell you your windows key. Write it down in several places. Get an image of 8.1 (several sources of good images). Install ssd. Install 8.1 using the installation key then switch key to your own windows key and activate.

I only have Windows 8. I actually tried to uprade to 8.1 and it failed during the download process, so I didn't get a new key and whatnot. And everything I've read says that the 8.1 ISO isn't a full install, only an upgrade, so I still have to install 8.0 first!

I did get the key using Magical Jellybean. I tried to use that key to download the 8.0 ISO from Microsoft, but it says I can't use it to download a retail copy. Why? I don't get how one version is different from another. Microsoft doesn't want me to download Windows 8 because I own Windows 8??

This is pretty ridiculous. You should have the right to install software that you own.

 

[postmortemIA]

I don't have an SSD-USB adapter. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure you can't just image the drive. Windows has to be set up for an SSD right? AND my HDD has about 450GB on it, and the new SSD is only 240GB.

Seriously, do I have to buy a new Windows 8 license? That's some BS.

There's no such thing as SSD-USB adapter. SATA to USB is another story. Acronis can do 450->240GB image transfer as long as you use less than 240GB on original disk, and you have one partition. it can even store disk image on original disk.

 

[Throckmorton]

There's no such thing as SSD-USB adapter. SATA to USB is another story. Acronis can do 450->240GB image transfer as long as you use less than 240GB on original disk, and you have one partition. it can even store disk image on original disk.

I mistyped... Surely you could figure that out from context! I didn't edit my post because I figured everyone here knew what I meant and no one was going to be pedantic.

And the Seagate software made by Acronis didn't recognize the SSD connected through USB. I managed to use a program called Paragon Migrate and it booted up and worked fine once, but not again.

But that's moot because it's not what I want. I want to be able to recover Windows which would have been impossible, because Paragon Migrate didn't transfer over the recovery partition.

I really don't understand why Microsoft makes this impossible without buying a retail key, and why ASUS doesn't provide you with a way to create recovery media like every other manufacturer does.

 

[ViRGE]

Okay, first things first.

1) Asus does in fact have a product/support page for your laptop. I'm surprised you weren't able to find it, but whatever. http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=3&s=530&m=Q550LF&os=&hashedid=n/a

2) Asus absolutely should include a recovery media creation utility with their Win8 laptops. They don't, and they suck because of it.

3) As a technical point, please note that for Windows 8 the keys are burnt into the BIOS. You don't need to be worrying about what your key is because if you do a reinstall of Windows, Windows will see the key and never ask you for it.

4) As everyone else has noted, the solution here is that you need to use a proper disk cloning utility to copy the entire HDD to your new SSD. This means all of the partitions, both OS and recovery. Once that is done you can then run the recovery partition to rebuild your OS (though I see no reason why you need to do that). The Seagate Acronis software will not work because it's keyed to only transfer to a Seagate drive (this is why it's free). I would second the vote for Clonezilla.

 

[Throckmorton]

Okay, first things first.

1) Asus does in fact have a product/support page for your laptop. I'm surprised you weren't able to find it, but whatever. http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=3&s=530&m=Q550LF&os=&hashedid=n/a

2) Asus absolutely should include a recovery media creation utility with their Win8 laptops. They don't, and they suck because of it.

3) As a technical point, please note that for Windows 8 the keys are burnt into the BIOS. You don't need to be worrying about what your key is because if you do a reinstall of Windows, Windows will see the key and never ask you for it.

4) As everyone else has noted, the solution here is that you need to use a proper disk cloning utility to copy the entire HDD to your new SSD. This means all of the partitions, both OS and recovery. Once that is done you can then run the recovery partition to rebuild your OS (though I see no reason why you need to do that). The Seagate Acronis software will not work because it's keyed to only transfer to a Seagate drive (this is why it's free). I would second the vote for Clonezilla.

You see no reason why someone would need to reinstall Windows? You must not be a Windows user, because after a certain time it needs to be reinstalled... Hell, even OSX does.

My SSD is a Seagate drive so the Seagate software should work. And if it did work, it wouldn't be able to fit a 1tb HDD's contents onto a 240gb SSD. Paragon can, but it didn't copy the recovery partition and gives no option to do so.

The ASUS website errors out when you select an OS

 

[unixwizzard]

your laptop should have an option to create a factory reset image.. this is separate from the Windows recovery drive utility.. generally the OEM will include such a utility

from what I gather from http://support.asus.com/Troubleshooting/detail.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=G73Sw&os=&no=1775 the utility you want is called AI Recovery Burner which I surmise will create a factory reset DVD .. it doesn't appear they have a utility that will create a reset image directly to a usb drive.

you could always try and see if that ASUS utility will allow you to create an .iso image, then you should be able to make a bootable thumb drive with the .iso.

 

[Throckmorton]

your laptop should have an option to create a factory reset image.. this is separate from the Windows recovery drive utility.. generally the OEM will include such a utility

from what I gather from http://support.asus.com/Troubleshooting/detail.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=G73Sw&os=&no=1775 the utility you want is called AI Recovery Burner which I surmise will create a factory reset DVD .. it doesn't appear they have a utility that will create a reset image directly to a usb drive.

you could always try and see if that ASUS utility will allow you to create an .iso image, then you should be able to make a bootable thumb drive with the .iso.

They stopped including that application after they started shipping Windows 8 laptops, presumably because Windows 8 has a recovery creator tool. I'm guessing some genius at Asus proposed letting Microsoft handle recovery, without considering that the Microsoft recovery requires the original hard drive with the recovery partition intact, even though it includes the option to put the recovery onto the thumbdrive! I did download and try it yesterday, but it failed to find the recovery partition.

I gave up and just got a Windows 8 ISO, made sure the checksum was right, and installed Windows clean. The Asus driver folder has a program that installs all the drivers automatically, aside from the reboots, so it was way easier than I expected.

 

[lightningbaron]

Get Acronis TrueImage 2013 or later, pop SSD in laptop, pop hard disk into an external USB dock/enclosure, and boot up from Acronis from CD. The rest should be self explanatory.

This was what I did in a nutshell with the Asus X202E about 12 months ago. I used Acronis TrueImage 2013 to clone from a 500GB hard drive to a 256GB SSD.

 

[ViRGE]

You see no reason why someone would need to reinstall Windows?

The point I was trying to get across was that you don't need to reinstall Windows just to switch from a HDD to a SSD. You may have other reasons for wanting to reinstall at some other time, but a drive swap only requires cloning.

My SSD is a Seagate drive so the Seagate software should work. And if it did work, it wouldn't be able to fit a 1tb HDD's contents onto a 240gb SSD. Paragon can, but it didn't copy the recovery partition and gives no option to do so.

Assuming you're talking about a full 1TB drive, then yeah, that's going to be a problem. Otherwise if we're just talking about partition sizes, I don't know about the stripped down version of Acronis that comes with Seagate drives, but at least in the full version partition resizing is a feature.

Though now finding out that your SSD is a Seagate SSD (boy, I forgot they even make SSDs) I'm surprised the included software didn't work. Obviously the concept is sound, but there must be some kind of compatibility issue.

The ASUS website errors out when you select an OS

For what it's worth it worked fine for me on IE11.

I gave up and just got a Windows 8 ISO, made sure the checksum was right, and installed Windows clean. The Asus driver folder has a program that installs all the drivers automatically, aside from the reboots, so it was way easier than I expected.

I'm glad to hear you got this working one way or another.

 

[Underclocked]

And everything I've read says that the 8.1 ISO isn't a full install, only an upgrade, so I still have to install 8.0 first!

For future reference, this is not true. The 8.1 iso (at least the real ones)are fulll operating systems and can easily be cleanly installed.

 

[accguy9009]

you want it easy way? buy Acronis disk image.
you want it free? get clonezilla.

Recently used Clonezilla to do this and it was straight forward.

http://www.forwestmedia.com/resourc...clonezilla-to-create-and-restore-disk-images/