OK, so I will try to outline the problem with the most detail I can. This Black Friday I bought an ASUS X501a from Tigerdirect.com (see link below) for 350 bucks. Now, let me say it is a great machine overall, considering the price (TN panel is OK, not horrible, and the HDD is really the only thing holding back performance). I knew these things going in, so I anticipated having to replace the 5400rpm drive with a SSD. Luckily, as this was black friday, I was able to purchase a 120 gig Kingston HyperX with upgrade kit from Newegg for 70 bucks (see below). I replaced the 60 gig OCZ Agility 3 I was using with as my boot drive in my desktop with the Kingston, with the intention of using the OCZ as the drive for the laptop (don’t need much space, as I do everything through google drive, etc).
So here is where the problems start. Now, as the X501 is a “ultra-thin”, it doesn’t have an optical drive. I figured this wouldn’t be an issue. I may be wrong... The disk imaging software that came with the SSD drive, Acronis something-or-other, is designed to clone from a laptop or Desktop. However, I don’t think it can be made into a bootable USB device. But this isn’t the first problem. The problem is that the BIOS won’t recognize anything but the WD drive that came with the computer as a boot option. I have USB bootable copies of both WIndows 7 and 8, but neither are recognized by the BIOS.
Frustrated, I removed the WD from the laptop and plugged both it and the OCZ drive into my desktop computer, figuring I could clone the disks using the optical drive in my Rig. This worked well enough in that Arconis loaded up and both drives appeared in the program, but the WD drive couldn’t be copied because it appeared “empty”. Well fuck. I tried reconnecting the drive to different SATA ports as well.
Any ideas? I put the WD back in my laptop as I use it for school (and it isn’t the easiest thing to put in and out, as it involves over a dozen screws and a guitar pick), so the next logical step would be to install windows on the OCZ using my desktop, then install the drive in my laptop and activate it there. I don’t want to deal with this (taking apart both of my computers is never fun), so if anyone has any advice, I’d really appreciate it.
Laptop: (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5328839&CatId=4935)
SDD Kit:
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239049)