A bit of background: I bought my GL551JW-DS74 back in March. (1TB HDD, 128GB SSD with the OS on it.) Within 3 weeks the SSD failed. The vendor (Newegg) replaced the laptop with a new one. Then in July the SSD failed again, so I sent it back to ASUS, and they swapped out the SSD and sent it back to me. A few days ago, the SSD failed again. (The computer only boots to the BIOS, and the BIOS sees no boot drive or any evidence of the SSD at all.) From reading Newegg reviews, it looks like I'm not the only one to have this problem. The BIOS doesn't see

So rather than send it back to ASUS again and wait a couple of weeks for another SSD that may very well fail again, I decided instead to leave the bad SSD in there (since I can't access it myself physically anyway), and buy a 500GB SSD (which I'll call SSD2 for the purpose of this post) to put in the slot where the 1TB HDD is. I then used a USB drive that I created with ASUS Recovery back when I first got the computer to re-install the OS on SSD2.

It MOSTLY works just fine now, but whenever I boot, I'll see the intial "Republic of Gamers" icon with the circling icon below it, and then the screen goes black for about 30-60 seconds. Then it comes back and Windows starts up. The same thing happens when I put the laptop to sleep: 30-60 seconds of blackness, then it finally comes back to life.

All I can figure, with my limited tech knowledge, is that the computer somehow is still trying to access the original SSD before doing anything. Assuming my guess is right, is there any way to completely disable the old(bad) SSD to prevent this? I can see it in there when I open the case, but it's sealed in there deeper than I know how to get at. Or am I wrong about the cause?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 🙂