I have a E5-521G-60BX that I got to replace my broken M5-581T-6087 (motherboard died/was outside of warranty/was a refurb on clearnce to begin with).
Once I got the new E5 I swapped alot of the higher end parts out of the older M5 (after having turned it on and making sure everything worked). Like the RAM (now has 8), dual band wifi antena, and its DVD drive (pressed into it a bit but still works). Notcied while I had it apart (probaly voiding the waranty, but Acers waranties are shaky to begin with) that even though the HDD in it is a 5mm drive like the one in the M5, it has room to take a full sized 2.5" 7mm drive.
I have a spare 250GB Agility3 SSD I'd like to install into it. After looking around for a solution on how to reinstall windows 8.1 onto the SDD I have gotten no soild answers so far. What I have found is the following and need to know if any of these are true with my model and if the differnt hardware will effect the reinstall.
1- Just use a regular 8.1 install disc after ploping in the new drive. It should detect the windows 8.1 key on the bios chip and skip past the regestration section straight into acount setup (and after having installed). -apears to work on some laptops.
2- create a system image/restore/whatever using acers recovery software installed onto the system onto a USB stick. Install SSD. Boot to the USB stick then follow instructions.
3- Make a system image through windows built in backup tools. Burn a recovery/system admin tools disc along side it. Install the SSD. Boot to the recovery/Admin tool disc and direct it to the system image that you made. Follow rest of instructions. (I know this worked for windows 7)
4- Burn a factory reset disc using Acers provided software- you can boot and install from that onto the SSD.
5-Clone the drive- not doing it for obvious system instability issues.
Do any of the recovery tool options actually reinstall windows or do they just make a generic clone of the drive to copy over later? If they just make a clone I'm not doing it for (again) stability/performance issues.
That first one, if it works please let me know and I'll test it (only one'll test). Since all these methods don't require me actually earsing the original drive I can try them all but would rather not for how time intensive they all are.
Are all those wrong and I'd just need to buy a new copy of windows 8.1? I just installed windows 7 on the M5 I had and didn't bother with 8 since it wasn't as developed as it is now. Should also note I got the laptop brand new and there was no factory install disc in the box.
