G73JW Bios to 205, now won't power on

[critcom]

Hello,

First time poster. I tried to be good by searching the forums for a solution to my problem before posting, but I didn't see anything that matched.

I have had my G73JW for a few years and tonight I thought I would drop in an SSD and reload it with Windows 8. While looking to see if there were any model specific drivers for Win 8, I noted that the BIOS (I had 203) had since been upgraded to 205.

Better upgrade, right? Make sure the BIOS is as current as it can be so there are no problems with the new OS. Not seeing any drivers for Win 8, I opted to go back and use Win 7 Pro as my OS instead. I'd just have disabled the Metro anyway.

The utility to upgrade the flash from the ASUS support website, when run, complained that my WIn 7 x64 was not the right OS for that program. Ok. I had seen a BIOS-based flash utility, I figured I'd just use that. I put the BIOS file, unextracted, in the Program Files directory so that the BIOS-based flasher could see it.

When selected, the BIOS-based flasher gave me a warning about missing model structure. Here (in hinghtsite) is where I should have said, "oh well, leave it now' but instead I told the program 'do it anyway'. It erased, it programmed, it verified, it said here comes the shutdown.

And down it stayed. Pressing the power button would not make it wake. The orange 'you should really get a new battery' light won't even come on. I tried some of the key combinations - control+home+power, to no effect.

I think the technical term is 'bricked'.

This (was) my primary work computer. I have filled out a technical support request with ASUS, but even being down a day while we work it out can't happen for me.

So, who's smarter than me? What are the real options here? Thanks in advance.

[cl-Albert]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay.

Hopefully someone has better ideas, but if you can't get the Ctrl+home+power to work, there probably aren't any great options left.

If you weren't using the original ASUS Windows image, or even if you were, make sure you see the G73JW bios.bin file located on the C: drive before trying the Ctrl+home+power procedure (don't forget to show hidden files and folders if necessary).

Also, if you didn't think if it already, you should be able to remove the hard drive and connect it to another computer with a USB to 2.5 inch hard drive adapter if you're more worried about getting to the data instead of getting the unit itself working.

Hope this helps.

[C4RN1]

There's not a lot you can do, I did this a few years ago to my g53. Asus attempted to fix it the first time, f'd it up and the mighty MASON stepped up and resolved my terrible RMA. Though sadly Mason no longer works for ASUS and I'm afraid things are worse than when I had this problem. Also i'm sure your warranty is long gone, so Asus would probably charge you more than what you can get another g73 for on ebay.

Back when this happened to me (and thousands of other poor fools that updated their bios from their hdd) I researched a fix to reprogram the bios chip.

Stumbled upon this

I dumped the contents of
the bricked BIOS, and discovered that the Easyflash tool uses an
incorrect buffer pointer (at least when doing NTFS based updates).
Rather than the new BIOS code, the tool wrote the contents of my
hard drive directory tree into the flash. Nice, huh? Needless to say,
the G74SX would do nothing, after the update (no sign of power, no
lights, dead to the world).

There also used to be an ebay seller that could reflash your bricked bios, you might have to look around a bit for that.

So your options are

- Reprogram your bios yourself (http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/656498-g74sx-circuit-reprogram-bios-spi.h...)
- Try to find the tech on ebay that reprograms bios
- Replace the bios chip itself (http://www.ebay.com/itm/BIOS-CHIP-ASUS-G73JW-/380413294563?pt=US_Motherboard_Components&hash=item589...)
- Replace the motherboard

Good Luck!

[billyray520]

Here's an Ebay link to repair the BIOS with a guarantee, and not altogether too unreasonable either. 🙂