hmscott wrote:
When you clone the old drive to the new drive put the new drive in Bay 2 to clone, then the old drive before booting - swap the new drive into bay 1 where the old drive was. It will boot fine, and your Windows serial isn't a problem.

If you go the Backtracker restore route, do the backup onto a 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive - not a USB 2.0 - it's too darned slow 🙂

Before doing the restore to the new SSD, make sure you pull all the other drives out of the laptop, as Backtracker restore will blow both drives away and recreate the partitions to OEM spec before restoring the OS drive.

I use Macrium Reflect for cloning, it also lets you resize the partitions.
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Another thought, my JH has a special adapter in Bay 1, with 2 NGFF SSD's in RAID0 - you can't remove that adapter to put in a 2.5" drive.

I think the JZ comes in 2 models, one with 2 NGFF SSD's in RAID0 and one with only 1 SSD - but I don't know if it is an NGFF drive or a 2.5" drive. If your JZ has the NGFF adapter in bay 1 you won't be able to swap out with a 2.5" Samsung 840 Pro.

The 2 x 128GB's in my JH are also Sandisk SSD's... you might want to pull the bottom panel and look into bay 1 to see what you have.

My specific model (the only one that avalible in israel) have only 1 SSD. So how should i proceed to do the process good as possible? I don't care to buy windows 8.1 pro for my laptop and start fresh but if i have OEM license so i better stick with it.

Honami wrote:
My specific model (the only one that avalible in israel) have only 1 SSD. So how should i proceed to do the process good as possible? I don't care to buy windows 8.1 pro for my laptop and start fresh but if i have OEM license so i better stick with it.

The Windows license is built into the laptop, so you can go ahead and either clone the original drive, or if you haven't done much configuration, or like to do it again cleanly, you can use Asus Backtracker to make a USB 3.0 16GB backup of the OS, and then use that to restore to your new SSD.

The Asus Backtracker restore will blow away any partitions it sees on drives it sees in the 2 drive bays, so if you want to preserve the data on the Bay 2 drive, pull it before the restore and put it back in afterwards.

The Asus Backtracker backup will only backup the OS recovery data, not you personal data, so be sure and back up your stuff before doing the restore.

Asus Backtracker Download
http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=3&s=480&m=ASUS+Backtracker&os=&hashedid=n%2fa

USB 2.0 is waaay too slow for this process - I know I tried it both with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 media, go out and get a fast USB3.0 to dedicate to the Asus Backtracker recovery drive 🙂

I put the old HD into an external USB 3.0 2.5" enclosure to be able to access the drive / free space, you can do the same - I would preserve the install on the original drive, just in case you need to send in the G750 for service - Asus prefers all original parts / OS installed for service.

For cloning I used Macrium Reflect, it lets you size the destination partitions to fit a larger HD into a smaller SSD, and worked well for me a number of times.

Macrium Reflect Free
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Let us know how it works out for you Honami!

hmscott wrote:
The Windows license is built into the laptop, so you can go ahead and either clone the original drive, or if you haven't done much configuration, or like to do it again cleanly, you can use Asus Backtracker to make a USB 3.0 16GB backup of the OS, and then use that to restore to your new SSD.

The Asus Backtracker restore will blow away any partitions it sees on drives it sees in the 2 drive bays, so if you want to preserve the data on the Bay 2 drive, pull it before the restore and put it back in afterwards.

The Asus Backtracker backup will only backup the OS recovery data, not you personal data, so be sure and back up your stuff before doing the restore.

Asus Backtracker Download
http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=3&s=480&m=ASUS+Backtracker&os=&hashedid=n%2fa

USB 2.0 is waaay too slow for this process - I know I tried it both with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 media, go out and get a fast USB3.0 to dedicate to the Asus Backtracker recovery drive 🙂

I put the old HD into an external USB 3.0 2.5" enclosure to be able to access the drive / free space, you can do the same - I would preserve the install on the original drive, just in case you need to send in the G750 for service - Asus prefers all original parts / OS installed for service.

For cloning I used Macrium Reflect, it lets you size the destination partitions to fit a larger HD into a smaller SSD, and worked well for me a number of times.

Macrium Reflect Free
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Let us know how it works out for you Honami!

So backup with ASUS Backtracker will put the OS to the state of clean install when i will restore the OS to the new SSD?
After i installed the new SSD i need to change something in the BIOS? (boot priority from USB flash drive)

Honami wrote:
So backup with ASUS Backtracker will put the OS to the state of clean install when i will restore the OS to the new SSD?
After i installed the new SSD i need to change something in the BIOS? (boot priority from USB flash drive)

The easiest way is to pull the boot drive out of Bay 1, and put the new SSD in that bay, and take out the drive in Bay 2 to preserve it during the restore - as the restore will re-partition any drive it finds in Bay1/Bay2 during the restore.

Then the new SSD will get partitioned like the original disk and the OS and Asus original configuration will get installed. After the restore you will reboot on the new SSD, and then you can shutdown and put the Bay 2 drive back in.

Then you will have an OS configuration just like it came out of the box, which means you will need to do all the updates and configurations / installations again.

Then you can take the original boot drive and put it in an external USB 3.0 case and plug it into the G750 to use the extra space - I would recommend preserving the original boot drive configuration in case you need to put it back in if you need to send the G750 in for service.

Let us know how it works out 🙂