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Repair guides and disassembly information for laptops manufactured by ASUS.

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(G75VW) Hard drive weirdness. SATA controller? Or something Asus did?

Have an Asus G75VW that presented itself with a non-bootable system. Booted from a Win10 USB and chkdsk found a crapload of issues on the drive, but the drive was still not bootable. I couldn’t risk wiping the drive due to the owner’s data still being on it so I put in a 1TB hybrid drive that I had available. Rebooted from Win10 USB; BIOS saw the drive and Win10 installer saw the drive, but the Win10 installer could not partition or use it, nor could I partition it via the command line. (The “clean” command worked, but I could not create a new partition.)

Thinking perhaps the hybrid drive was bad I pulled it and plugged it into a USB enclosure, and that into another PC. That other PC was able to access the drive without issues, including creating a partition/formatting. Even after creating a new partition and transplanting it back into the Asus, the Asus still behaved poorly with it.

Then I thought perhaps the Asus didn’t like hybrid drives so I put a new 1TB hard drive in there. This one behaved even worse; BIOS didn’t see the drive at all, Windows installer took FOREVER to boot and get to the install pages, and once it got to the “where to install Windows” screen it showed the drive as having zero space. Again, putting this drive into a USB enclosure works perfectly.

Now I’m thinking it may be a SATA controller issue. I pulled an older 500GB drive off the shelf, plugged it into the Asus, and…it works perfectly. No issue whatsoever.

What’s up with this computer that it doesn’t like 1TB drives?

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It also might be RAM issue… if one sector is bad, it might not be triggered by WinPE as they are very low-RAM demanding, but it can cause issues on normal boot.

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Few things I would also check is the BIOS settings, make sure it's set to AHCI and not RAID.

I'm curious if the system is stable if windows 10 was fresh installed on a hard drive on another laptop then that same drive put into the laptop with the problem and see if the problem persists.

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The 1TB hard drive I installed turned out to be bad. About an hour after I posted the drive failed even in the USB enclosure.

I got a second new 1TB hard drive. BIOS does not see the drive, but Windows Installer does and is able to format/partition and copy the installer files to it. But when the laptop reboots, it reboots into BIOS.

Combing through the internet I found a number of people with similar situations (involving HDs, hybrids, and SSDs) but no solid solution.

* Original 1TB hard drive is seen by BIOS and "works" excepting the fact that it's failing.

* 1TB Seagate hybrid drive is seen by BIOS and Windows Installer, but any attempt to format/partition it fails.

* 1TB WD hard drive is not seen by BIOS but is seen by Windows Installer, can be formatted/partitioned, and the install process begins without incident, but on the first reboot during the install process the computer boots into BIOS (won't boot from the drive).

* 500GB Hitachi hard drive (old) works absolutely perfectly in every regard.

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Oh, it's also not a RAM issue. MemTest passes the memory (8GB) with flying colors, plus keep in mind the computer DOES boot and run with the 500GB drive.

BIOS is set to AHCI.

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Steve will be eternally grateful.
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