I remain baffled about the SSD in these. I found several posts all over about how the drives and the motherboards of this laptop had problems. Here's my question:
For months the laptop (not mine, my wife's, Windows 8) was slow to boot and shutdown. When I finally looked at it, it was 6-10 minutes to boot and sometimes didn't appear to shut off at all.
I did NOT see the SSD in BIOS or in Windows. After messing with several elements like DISKPART, Express, Intel Rapid, etc. I could get nowhere. After a long sequence of seeing only one disk with "LIST DISK", one in Device Manager and one in BIOS, suddenly I was seeing the 24GB SSD in all those places. However, DISKPART took forever to list the two and the disk manager app didn't display anything, while device manager DID.
I installed and uninstalled the Intel Rapid Tech thing twice, turned the Express cache thing on and off a couple of times. I tried ECCMD.exe to create a partition and DISKPART as well, selecting disk 1 and doing a CLEAN. It still complained about an HFS partition not mounted and no creation of partitions.
You know how it is when you spend four days trying to figure this out. It's hard to keep straight what BIOS options etc you went through.
SO I set things back the way they were and again, no SSD visible anywhere, but SURPRISE!
Now the boot time in about one minute and shutdown is 18 seconds!
Does this mean:
A. The SSD is bad and now that the controller isn't trying to read it, things are working.
B. The SSD is working as it should and it's true that you should NOT see the SSD listed anywhere
C. Something else?
While I'm totally puzzled, I fear touching anything at all will hex it, so I don't dare make changes. I'm still waiting for a second reply from ASUS (it's out of warranty) after getting a long cut and pasted message about going back to factory default state and losing everything. If the notebook keeps working like it is now, who cares about the SSD, except that it's one of the main selling points so I am very curious to hear if anyone has any comments.
For months the laptop (not mine, my wife's, Windows 8) was slow to boot and shutdown. When I finally looked at it, it was 6-10 minutes to boot and sometimes didn't appear to shut off at all.
I did NOT see the SSD in BIOS or in Windows. After messing with several elements like DISKPART, Express, Intel Rapid, etc. I could get nowhere. After a long sequence of seeing only one disk with "LIST DISK", one in Device Manager and one in BIOS, suddenly I was seeing the 24GB SSD in all those places. However, DISKPART took forever to list the two and the disk manager app didn't display anything, while device manager DID.
I installed and uninstalled the Intel Rapid Tech thing twice, turned the Express cache thing on and off a couple of times. I tried ECCMD.exe to create a partition and DISKPART as well, selecting disk 1 and doing a CLEAN. It still complained about an HFS partition not mounted and no creation of partitions.
You know how it is when you spend four days trying to figure this out. It's hard to keep straight what BIOS options etc you went through.
SO I set things back the way they were and again, no SSD visible anywhere, but SURPRISE!
Now the boot time in about one minute and shutdown is 18 seconds!
Does this mean:
A. The SSD is bad and now that the controller isn't trying to read it, things are working.
B. The SSD is working as it should and it's true that you should NOT see the SSD listed anywhere
C. Something else?
While I'm totally puzzled, I fear touching anything at all will hex it, so I don't dare make changes. I'm still waiting for a second reply from ASUS (it's out of warranty) after getting a long cut and pasted message about going back to factory default state and losing everything. If the notebook keeps working like it is now, who cares about the SSD, except that it's one of the main selling points so I am very curious to hear if anyone has any comments.