G15 will not boot past BIOS

[Jeezus1]

I have an Asus Zephyrus G15 GA503RM that I recently picked up second hand and the original owner kept his SSD. I put a new SSD in and plugged in a thumb drive with windows to load onto the new SSD. I’ve built hundreds of PCs and have done this hundreds of times so I figured no big deal. 

At first, I would just get the Asus boot logo and then just nothing for a couple minutes before the laptop would just turn itself off. Well, I figured out how to enter the BIOS (holding f2 through the initial booting process) and looked around in there. Everything is recognized in the BIOS (memory, CPU, integrated graphics and GPU, the new SSD, and my thumb drive). I went into the boot manager and selected my thumb drive with windows installer on it. Then I got just a black screen… It wouldn’t shut off after a couple minutes like before, now it stays on this black screen forever. The fans sometimes really ramp up too, as if the computer is doing something but nothing is happening at all. I let it sit on this black screen for an hour, nothing happens, the computer gets quite warm. Even after an hour, I can press ctrl+alt+delete to restart the boot sequence as if I’ve been stuck on a boot screen that whole time, but the screen was black.

I noticed the BIOS was slightly out of date (build 317) so I flashed a different thumb drive with the latest 318 build and updated the BIOS successfully to 318. Tried everything I could possibly think of again, just to achieve the same results. I tried removing the RAM stick (8gb is soldered to the MB) to see if that would change anything and nope.

I’m completely stumped. It seems to work fine in terms of the fans spinning, keyboard lighting up, getting to BIOS fine and even updating the BIOS, but I just can’t get past the BIOS. The only even slightly related posts I’ve found have mentioned enabling CSM and UEFI boot, but neither of those options are in this BIOS at all. This is actually one of the most basic BIOS I’ve ever seen. A quick side note, I have since verified that both my new SSD and my thumb drive with the windows installer on it work perfectly fine on my main desktop PC so I don’t think those are the issue. Any help or guidance would be massively appreciated!

[Jeezus1 · Accepted solution]

I managed to find my own solution on an obscure post digging through these forums. I reverted my BIOS version back to build 313 and everything is perfectly back to normal! I spent DAYS trying to figure this out and suddenly found my own solution. I will leave this post up incase anyone else encounters this same issue. No idea why builds 317 and 318 wouldn’t work for me at all and in the same ways. 

[tronnerson]

DOnt revert bios, if its a intel cpu on the motherboard theres a stupid setting in the bios that doesnt allow the new ssd to be recognized just turn it off and your drive will show up for windows install. look under the bios for a VMD and disable it. Tada your ssd will now show up once you save and exit bios.

[Jeezus1]

Ga503rm uses AMD cpu. Also my SSD was always visible as a boot option. I would select my SSD in the boot menu and then I would get an infinite black screen. Reverting to older BIOS completely fixed my issue and I’ve had no issues since.

Ironically, when all of this was happening, I messaged Asus support and they wanted $580 to replace my motherboard since I’m one month past the end of the 2 year warranty. But the motherboard wasn’t the problem, it was Asus’s firmware. Seems like they just conveniently started rolling out firmware updates that brick laptops so they could collect RMA money. Lying scammers. I wonder if I sent in for repairs if they would have just reverted my motherboard to an older Bios and still charged me $580 claiming they fixed it…