A few months ago, I noticed one of my internal hard drives would randomly disappear. I have a Corsair Force 3 128g SSD, and the stock Seagate 1tb 5400rpm drive used for storage. It was the storage drive that would disappear, so I swapped the drives in the internal bays. This caused windows to randomly crash, and give me boot failures, having to constantly go into BIOS and manually re-set the Force 3 as the primary boot option (when it saw it).
I swapped the hard drives back to their original bays, and tried a different hard drive in the bay that appeared to be failing, and it as well would randomly "not see" the drive. I contacted ASUS support about this, however they were less than helpful (besides the fact that I purchased the laptop literally 1 year ago, and am now out of the warranty period).
I finally gave up on trying to find a solution, and just didn't use the problem HDD bay at all. Unfortunately today I went to turn my laptop on, and it threw me a "no bootable device – insert boot disk and press any key" error. BIOS didn't see the HDD, so I swapped it into the other HDD bay, and it booted...sort of. It gave me the same "no bootable device" error later, and the only work around I found was rebooting and entering BIOS, rebooting and entering BIOS, rebooting and entering BIOS until it "sees" the drive again. Then it boots fine.
I connected all the drives to my desktop to see if they are the culprit, and they have not shown any sign of instability. It seems very unlucky to have BOTH hard drive bays malfunctioning or failing, which is why I'm curious if anyone has any ideas. I'm pretty savvy with computers, but this has me baffled. Any ideas to try before taking things further with ASUS, or trying to have it repaired?
Please let me know if you need any additional information, thanks for any help you can provide. It'd be a shame to have a $1300 doorstop, I love this laptop so much!
~Aaron