About a year ago, I tried to downgrade my ASUS G501 laptop to Windows 7. It was a miserable failure, with driver support severely lacking; I decided to give up and rather upgrade to Windows 8.1. At this point, I found out that the Windows 7 installer had apparently broken the factory recovery partition, leaving me with a laptop I couldn’t use.
I turned to Google and quickly found someone else in a similar situation on Reddit. However, no one was on hand to offer help, so I continued digging on my own. I managed to get my recovery partition working again, got Windows 8 installed, and backed up the recovery partition.
If you need to restore your G501JW, download the recovery image at https://neo.elverstone.com/asus/asus_g501jw_recovery.bin (Originally hosted at http://neo.27.am/asus/asus_g501jw_recovery.bin), write it to a 16GB+ USB flash drive with PassMark’s ImageUSB tool, and boot off it.
Hi. I notice the download link for this is no longer active. Is there any chance you might still have the .bin file stored and able to send it/temporarily upload it somewhere? As I am in the same situation as you were with a second-hand G501JW and a corrupted restore partition…
Sorry about that. I’ve fixed the link.
Some more info on the recovery image:
Size: 15,631,122,944 bytes
SHA1: 3e150863cbc3a5d265801a82f446b825ac4bccb1