Asus G750J only boots to bios/setup utility

[schlitch]

I have an ASUS G750JH purchased spring of this year and upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 windows at that time. All has been running fine with it. Nothing has been installed on it recently. The laptop was on last night and this morning it is at the bios/setup screen. Esc and exit without save does nothing. Exit with Save simply restarts it an boots it back into the bios. No bios updates or any hardware upgrades have been performed. The SATA configuration still lists the SSD, the HD, and the cd/dvd drive. In other systems I've always been able to select a boot order, but that doesn't appear to be enabled or an ability. The only thing I attempted was setting the bios options to default with F9, but as I had never changed them, that didn't appear update anything.

I've searched for posts, but it seems they are all talking about problems after updating the bios, or attempting to install a new O/S. Nothing has been done to my system like this at all.

I suspected the SSD drive, but usually if a drive goes bad they don't show up in the bios. However, since it is an SSD, I'm sure it behaves somewhat differently.

Has anyone seen this problem reported and have solutions on where to start before I attempt warranty support?
Thanks

...so I opened the system and the ssd drives are not drives at all, but appear to be some proprietary mSATA type chips that I have no way of mounting into my external sata connector for testing (horrible idea ASUS). There were 2 of these marked 128GB and since only one SSD is appearing in the SATA configuration, I must assume that one of them is bad. Pretty sad, as this laptop has only been lightly used over a short period of time.

I'm just more confused it appears the 2 128GB SSDs are treated as one 256GB drive, so it is being recognized by the bios as being there. Wonder if I try F9 at bootup if that will wipe everything and let me start with a new win8 installation.

[schlitch]

I thought that even though it wanted 3GB free it might not take up that much space, but the backtracker will not let me proceed to the next step using my 16gb as it checks the free space and 1.55 isn't enough. I'll just place them onto another device for now.

Of course the whole time I'm doing this, I'm thinking about my call with ASUS tech support. Even if I have this backup to restore the system, if the SSD chip they have in the JH goes out, they will not send out a replacement. The support person told me for those they would have to receive the whole system back to check and replace. And in that case the total system disk image will end up being more helpful I think.

[hmscott]

schlitch wrote:
I thought that even though it wanted 3GB free it might not take up that much space, but the backtracker will not let me proceed to the next step using my 16gb as it checks the free space and 1.55 isn't enough. I'll just place them onto another device for now.

Of course the whole time I'm doing this, I'm thinking about my call with ASUS tech support. Even if I have this backup to restore the system, if the SSD chip they have in the JH goes out, they will not send out a replacement. The support person told me for those they would have to receive the whole system back to check and replace. And in that case the total system disk image will end up being more helpful I think.

schlitch, I 7-zip'd the C:\eSupport folder, which is the same thing, and put it on the same 16GB drive 🙂

[schlitch]

thanks for that, I'll search for the esupport folder. But I only have 1.55 GB left on the flash for mine so if mine is 1.6 it may not fit 🙂

[schlitch]

zipped and fit the esupport folder onto the USB drive successfully.