Model is ASUS F505ZA-DH51 Thanks much Paul! I have followed a disassembly youtube vid and yes, it requires removing the keyboard by removing all the screws from the bottom and running a guitar pick under the surface of the top edge and then the keyboard is removable. I carefully lift and tip the keyboard out, leaving the connectors. Then the mother board is accessible and the show me guy swaps out drives. Where he has a drive, I do not. It's not there. The expansion bay for a 2.5" drive is visible but it's upside down. I had cloned the onboard drive to a 500GB SSD and was able to gently get it, upside down, into the bay and plugged in. It shows up as a bootable drive in the BIOS. But the UUID problem causes the onboard drive to boot regardless of my setting the boot order (which I can discern by the size of the partitions). Obviously the default as it doesn't matter how I set the boot order, I can't boot the expansion bay drive. Obviously the machine wants to boot the factory drive. I think changing the UUID is possibly best. On 8/10/25 03:12PM, Paul wrote:
Do you have a model number for the laptop? If you provide it, we might find some disassembly guides.
Have you tried removing the keyboard to see if you have access to the ssd that way? I know some Asus models did that at one point. I hate how difficult laptops have gotten to work on. I love my Thinkpad t480. It's nice and easy to work on. But it's getting a bit long in the tooth, and accessible hardware is definitely the exception and not the rule these days.
On Sun, Aug 10, 2025 at 2:44 PM Brian O'Keefe <okeefe@cybermesa.com> wrote:
Thanks Paul
That seems pretty simple. Still wonder why the motherboard is in upside down and screws not accessible to lift it out. Weird.
I actually cloned one drive to another, larger drive. I've done this many times and would just take out the old drive and install the cloned drive. I did this as I required more data storage. However, I can't remove the factory drive as it's not accessible. If I could I would do what I said. Clone the computer's drive to a larger drive, swap them out and boot happily away with the larger drive. Changing the UUID made sense but I didn't know how to do that.
On 8/10/25 12:23PM, Paul wrote:
It sounds like you may have cloned one partition to the other? This would explain them having the same uuid. You need to change the uuid of one of the partitions.
Let's say you want to change the uuid of /dev/sdb1. Make sure the partition is not mounted, then use:
`sudo tune2fs -U random /dev/sdb1`
That should do it.
This is untested on my part, so please do all the necessary backing up, etc. before trying.
On Sat, Aug 9, 2025 at 1:20 PM Brian O'Keefe <okeefe@cybermesa.com> wrote:
Hello All
I'm revisiting an issue I expressed many months (if not years. I have an ASUS laptop in which I wanted to install a 500GB SSD in the vacant bay. I said at the time that the motherboard is up side down so I can't remove the existing drive (a SSD PLUS M.2 NVMe^TM SSD,) and replace with the 500GB SSD drive. I was able to get the regular SSD into the bay and plug it in. It shows up in the BIOS as two separate UUIDs (I have a bootable 313 GB partition and a free space 193 GB partition. When I choose to try and boot the 313 GB partition the computer reverts to the drive stick. I checked the UUIs and the 313GB has a different UUID than the internal stick drive but the same as the 193 SSD. So for some reason, even though I change the boot order so the 313GB boots, the computer reverts to the onboard UUID and boots that. I don't know how the 193 GB drive got the same UUID but it did.
When I boot the computer I get the option of booting Ubuntu 20.04 but 16.04 is also listed. That is the 313 GB which I was planning to wipe and install 25.04. Perhaps I can wipe it with GParted and try installing 25.04 on it.
Sorry about the long screed! I'd love to get the 313GB to boot 25.04 so I can see if it works on the old cloned 313GB drive with 16.04. If that worked I'd have a current back-up (I have one, the unbootable 313GB drive which won't boot). I would then upgrade the 313 GB drive after cloning the onboard drive. If the cloned 313GB drive updated then I would have my current mountains of data on the 313GB drive. But if it won't boot now why would it boot later, after all of the work?
Many thanks if anyone wants to help. If not I completely understand
Best
Brian
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