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Need Help - G73 won't boot up

Thail
Level 7
I bought my girlfriend a G73 for her birthday last year, it has been working great for her until recently. Currently when powering on the unit, it shows the ASUS splash screen, plays the Post sound, then goes to a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

Pressing F9 to get into recovery mode does not work, however we can access the bios just fine.


She called ASUS to attempt to correct the issue, and the technician asked if she has made restore discs (which she had not!) and told her he couldn't help her anymore since she didn't have restore discs. He gave her a website she could in theory use to get a hold of restore discs but it has been down for over a week ( us.estore.asus.com ).

In an attempt to get her computer up and running we set the bios to load CD first, then I had her try using my G75 restore discs which didn't work, though it did load in to windows and told us it was the wrong version.

At this point I'm at a loss for next steps.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
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11 REPLIES 11

dstrakele
Level 14
I get that behavior if I attempt to boot my G74SX when my phone is attached to a USB port for charging. If no peripheral devices are attached (including an SD card in the Card Reader), the HDD may have failed or is poorly seated. See this post: http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?19336-Need-help-getting-my-Asus-G53jw-to-boot!!!&p=133132&v....
G74SX-A1 - stock hardware - BIOS 202 - 2nd Monitor VISIO VF551XVT

dstrakele wrote:
I get that behavior if I attempt to boot my G74SX when my phone is attached to a USB port for charging. If no peripheral devices are attached (including an SD card in the Card Reader), the HDD may have failed or is poorly seated. See this post: http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?19336-Need-help-getting-my-Asus-G53jw-to-boot!!!&p=133132&v....


No peripherals were plugged in. I attempted to reseat the hard drive as well as swap it to the second hard drive bay. Neither of which worked. I have an old hard drive with win XP on it that I put in the second hard drive bay and was able to boot into that copy of windows (in safe mode since the drivers are all for another computer). However after doing so it doesn't seem to see the original hard drive. I'm going to see if I can get some partition software to see the drive, however I am unsure what the process will be for restoring the drive without restore disks.

If I am able to get the drive re-partitioned, should I just install windows 7 from a windows 7 install disk or is there something special I will need to do?

Just install and then download the drivers from the ASUS site and from the vendor's site (nVidia drivers, at least).
I am disturbed because I cannot break my system...found out there were others trying to cope! We have a support group on here, if your system will not break, please join!
http://rog.asus.com/forum/group.php?groupid=16
We now have 178 people whose systems will not break! Yippee! 🙂
LINUX Users, we have a group!
http://rog.asus.com/forum/group.php?groupid=23

Zygomorphic
Level 17
Download and run a LINUX live image (www.ubuntu.com) and see if you can access the HDD. If so , the files are safe and Windows is corrupted. If not, then look at hardware problems :(. Those are worse. It is possible that the Windows boot loader is corrupted, and that is why things don't work. F9 I believe is the Windows recovery, which will not work if the Windows loader is damaged.

Good luck!
I am disturbed because I cannot break my system...found out there were others trying to cope! We have a support group on here, if your system will not break, please join!
http://rog.asus.com/forum/group.php?groupid=16
We now have 178 people whose systems will not break! Yippee! 🙂
LINUX Users, we have a group!
http://rog.asus.com/forum/group.php?groupid=23

dstrakele
Level 14
From your last post, it certainly appears like the HDD has failed. I used a utility called TestDisk to recover files from my daughter's badly damaged (many bad blocks) HDD. I couldn't even run CHKDSK on it. You may find it useful as well...


The HDD may be so damaged as to be unusable. It may still be under warranty, however, so if you find that to be the case, contact ASUS to see if they will replace it.
G74SX-A1 - stock hardware - BIOS 202 - 2nd Monitor VISIO VF551XVT

Idestruction
Level 7
And for the record, the Asus estore is down due it being hacked... was supposed to be up this week according to the rep I spoke to on Monday or Tuesday

Thail
Level 7
Alright Update...
We ran the laptop on the old hard drive and RMA'd the pre-existing hard drive to ASUS after talking to 3 different support reps and calling 4 times. The first call and the first two reps all mysteriously disconnected. However the fourth rep finally processed the RMA.

We sent in the hard drive and just today received a hard drive back from ASUS. In the package it stated they reproduced the issue, and repaired the notebook, though below it was checked "Replaced hard drive".

I removed the temporary hard drive from the laptop and plugged in the returned RMA'd hard drive, made sure the bios was set to boot from the correct hard drive, then attempted to boot and it says insert bootable disk. I may be wrong but I was under the impression that ASUS would send a hard drive that had all the ASUS software pre-installed including the recovery partition so that we could burn her recovery disks. This however does not appear to be the case.

What are my next steps? The E-store is still down, and I don't have a windows install disk to even attempt to go about installing windows that way. (The buddy I thought had one actually just had an upgrade disc)

Thail wrote:
Alright Update...
We ran the laptop on the old hard drive and RMA'd the pre-existing hard drive to ASUS after talking to 3 different support reps and calling 4 times. The first call and the first two reps all mysteriously disconnected. However the fourth rep finally processed the RMA.

We sent in the hard drive and just today received a hard drive back from ASUS. In the package it stated they reproduced the issue, and repaired the notebook, though below it was checked "Replaced hard drive".

I removed the temporary hard drive from the laptop and plugged in the returned RMA'd hard drive, made sure the bios was set to boot from the correct hard drive, then attempted to boot and it says insert bootable disk. I may be wrong but I was under the impression that ASUS would send a hard drive that had all the ASUS software pre-installed including the recovery partition so that we could burn her recovery disks. This however does not appear to be the case.

What are my next steps? The E-store is still down, and I don't have a windows install disk to even attempt to go about installing windows that way. (The buddy I thought had one actually just had an upgrade disc)


http://www.mydigitallife.info/download-windows-7-iso-official-32-bit-and-64-bit-direct-download-link...
USA ASUS Reseller
http://www.neteffectspc.com

dstrakele
Level 14
If you follow the link Shawn provided, you can download the version of Windows 7 that shipped with your laptop as an ISO file, burn it to a DVD, use the DVD to install Windows 7 to your new HDD, install the recent versions of necessary drivers (including the ASUS ATK Package for Function Key functionality), and if all is working well, use the Windows 7 Product Key on the label on the bottom of your laptop to activate your Windows installation.
G74SX-A1 - stock hardware - BIOS 202 - 2nd Monitor VISIO VF551XVT