G73JH bricked (can't access BIOS anymore)?

[kharrisma10]

Hi folks,

Here's a good one for ya... So my current Win7 install got squirrelly unstable on me, and I decided to re-install both OS' s clean, from scratch, only to find that my blu-ray drive won't read home-burned discs anymore, only commercially-burned ones. While trying to solve that, my wireless connection fails, and I can't get it back; sometimes the card sees the network but is "unable to connect," and other times it doesn't see networks at all. Now I'm chasing down 2 problems, and then the touchpad just stops working altogether.

It's at this point I give up and go ahead with installing Win7 (can't upgrade to Win10... Asus refuses to support this machine with anything other than Win7... nice, huh? It totally locked up when I tried back when it was a free upgrade.) Pulled my second drive out (that one's for Linux.) Used my "system restore" disc from XoticPC, with the no network problem persisting as it went in. Tried a whole lot of things and finally got the network back, but then started getting frequent "blue screens of death." Tried another clean install and this one was trouble-free, but the BSoD's kept happening. Put second drive back in and went to install Linux... and optical drive still won't read my burned Linux disc. Much messing around later, gave up and bought a bootable Linux USB stick. This is where things REALLY went sideways.

Had to make changes in BIOS to boot from USB. Install Linux, reboot machine normally, and it boots straight to Linux... Can't manage to get it to run Win7 at all. Pulled the Linux drive, rebooted... and it tells me to install a bootable media. Linux apparently trashed my Win install. Anyway, after a lot more of pulling one drive or the other and reinstalling one OS or another, I still don't have a dual-boot system (I've set up dually's many times, but this time Linux, while it sees the existing Win install, won't set up the dual-boot as it always did before.)

Eventually I wound up back in Win7, researching manually setting up dual OS systems, and decide to call it a night. Windows, however, as it sometimes does (hate Windows... it's such a rude OS compared to other OS's... I use it only for gaming) decided it was going to totally take over and install 111 updates. Yep 111, that's not a typo. Much time later, it finally goes to reboot... and the machine never worked again. Can't boot from ANY source, and THIS is where I find that I can't even gain access to the BIOS anymore.

Went to the web on my phone (it's what I'm using now...) and tried everything that people have tried with similar problems, with no success. So where I stand now is this: plug in power supply, and the machine instantly powers up; those three buttons on the upper-left just below the display light up and stay lit. The num and caps lock indicators light briefly, then go off. The optical drive chugs once then goes quiet, no spin-up. Hard drives don't appear to spin up at all. After a short while, both cooling fans spin up to full speed, and that's it. It will eject the optical drive with a button push, and will shut down with a long press of the power button. If I plug in the battery, it stays dead until I hit the power button, where it repeats the above sequence.

I've tried all the ways to reset the thing ( pulling all power, hold power button for one minute; holding the reset button on the underside... I even went so far as to pull the mobo and replace the CMOS battery; it sat with no battery in it for several hours.) Still no success.

Apologies for being so very long-winded, but too much info is better.than not enough. I'm hoping against hope that someone here has run into something like this and has found a solution. Apparently, this is not an unheard-of problem with Asus laptops, judging from the amount of hits I got when searching. Thanks for reading all this, and I really hope someone has an answer. If not I guess replacing the mobo is my next logical step.

[xeromist]

The G73jh had issues with the graphics adapter ( I know because I have one) and when I have a dead GPU installed the system powers on but remains unresponsive like yours. Sounds like your hardware was starting to fail and perhaps all of the rebooting finally killed it. Unfortunately these are such old machines now that they aren't really worth repairing.

[JustinThyme]

I’m with xeromist on this one. Manufacturers of anything only support for so long. The machine was designed around an OS and at some point they have to stop support just line the OS eventually stops support such as windows 7 ends in Jan 2020 so only 2 more years and you won’t be able to get updates.*

My guess is you won’t be able to find anything but a used MOBO for that machine if any. With so many products they can’t keep making spare parts forever. Eventually they discontinue hardware support to free up the resources for newer items. *Your machine is 7 years old, surprised it made it this long. I have a G74SX that’s still running and on Win 10 but for how much longer is anyone’s bet. I had to replace the wireless half mini in it a couple of years ago when it died and was old anyhow. It runs the AC 7960 just fine. It’s old and slow by today’s standards but the wifey uses it sitting at the island in the kitchen for web surfing and light documents, that’s about it. When a surface pro 4 with CPU Iris graphics beats it in benchmarks (like double) that’s saying something. You can pick up last generations machines for a pretty good discount, I’m thinking it’s time to take a look.*

[cl-Albert]

Just a friendly reminder that if you have any data on your hard drive that you still want to access, you can remove the hard drive from your system and use an external USB hard drive housing to transfer the data to another system to use as external storage as well although I would be a little concerned that old hard drive may die eventually too. Thanks.

Also, don't know much about it and if this would apply to your system or this situation, but thought you may want to take a look at the thread below for the G750JZ if you're not worried at all about making things worse or have nothing to lose.

https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?87285-Bricked-880M-on-Asus-Rog-G750JZ-please-help