hi our g55 can fit in the 12mm caddy without problem. regarding the transfer rate. it's a sata 2 port and the stock HDD isn't that fast (5400rpm). No noticeable slow down on my side tho.

And yes of course ur stock HDD to the caddy and the SSD to the hdd bay (sata 3) alot of us have done this actually.

regarding the windows 8, the key actually comes along the bios on the hdd bay port so if u install fresh windows 8 it will automatically retrieve the key. unless u are installing it to a different port which u might need to extract the token (i'm not so good in this since i don't have a win 8 pre-loaded device) but thats what i know.

can you see your ssd in the bios menu?

have you initiated your ssd? if you haven't, right click on your computer icon in file explorer and choose manage. then from the computer management, select storage > disk management. a dialogue should pop up and ask you to initiate the new disk. it's best to make it mbr disk.

ure just using it for storage? if u're going to use it for os might as well just let the os format and create volume partition for u.

No problem

Yeah if you havent updated the firmware you should do that first. A simple volume is fine. Sorry im not familiar with m4. Maybe you should google and see what the latest firmware fixed.

Oh i didnt know that you wanna install w8 lol! The process should be more simple like holloway said.

Now you need to do this:
1. Convert it to gpt;
2. Clear all partitions;
3. Take out stock drive and put the ssd into hdd partition;
4. Install windows.
Haha!

yeah diskpart does the trick

er.. that one i don't know. i never used back tracker before. from what i've learned, it should be no problem. note that you should use fat32 for your recovery usb.

no problem man :/

for recovery usb created by back tracker, you shouldn't do anything from what i've read. read here.

the cd key in pid.txt is for OS installations other than untouched w8 (e.g. w8 pro). the w8 installer will pick up the key from bios.

uh? what's your w8 version? are you doing the clean install or using the recovery usb created by back tracker?

have you tried to plug to other system to test on the SSD? The SSD might have issue, try to figure it out 1st b4 taking it to service center. I have no idea whats the problem caused by it.

Good luck if u taking it to Asus service center....

if you opened up the administrative command prompt and issue slmgr /dlv what did the dialog tells you? you can upload the screen shot of it here.

edit: there is a possibility that the activation count for that oem key to be full, that leads to the failed attempts. i used advanced tokens manager to back up the tokens and restore it when i do clean install (without online activations). you can try use that tool to save the tokens from your stock drive, then use it to restore the activation.

edit2: make sure your oem key is correct for that token. you can verify the last 5 chars from the Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Action Center > Windows Activation.

yeah i never activated my copy of w8 pro more than once. i just restored the tokens (and i reinstalled clean OS in this g55 countless times dy. never failed)

good luck man :/ i hope it's not the problem of the w8 single language version.

ah.. that's what i've suspected; the real cause of this :/

are you using the w8 usb (fat32)? if you do, you can try modify your w8 install usb by putting the ei.cfg in sources folder. the content of this ei.cfg are as follows:



you might wanna put the key in sources\pid.txt, too:



reinstall w8 with this modified one. good luck.

you should be fine reset them to defaults. the key now is to make the installer to be oem, instead of retail.

maybe you can try to get the rtm version (e.g. this one)

so, what's your stock w8? can you show us the dialog for slmgr /dlv when you're in the stock w8? when i was helping at ROG, the friends there never had a problem doing clean install (well, if they do it correctly that is). the untouched w8 rtm iso was supposed to work well.