G551JW Stuck on boot screen

[orange_angel]

Hi all. I installed Ubuntu 14.04 on my brand new Asus G551JW laptop a few months ago, alongside the original Windows os. I remember changing a few settings in Bios, to disable secure boot I think. However now I believe that there's something not quite right with the settings in Bios, or at least I hope it's as simple as that.

When I boot the laptop it stays at the boot screen forever but eventually I get the message:
"PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-MOF: Exiting PXE ROM."


There's a long wait to get into Bios, but I can get there. Under the Boot tab in Bios I can see that there's two Boot Options listed, P2: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM and Realtek PXE B05 D00. None of them seems to be the hard drive which would of course explain the trouble with booting. However under the Advanced tab and SATA Configuration I have the CDROM on SATA port 2, the regular hard drive on port 4 and the SSD on port 5. The SSD is the one I would like to boot from.

Any suggestions on how to get the laptop to boot from the SSD once again would be very appreciated.

[Gps3dx]

Hello,
In order for the community to help you, you need to provide some technical details:

• Are your ssd/hdd ( the drive with the OS ) is formatted as GPT OR MBR ?
  if you've installed ubuntu, you must know how to boot it from a USB in a "LIVE" mode -> open Gparted, check there, and report here.
  
• what windows version you currently got installed ? 8/8.1/10 ?
  
• Have you made a CLEAN install of windows or have you stayed with the "pre-installed" windows 8/8.1 that came from asus ?
  

For the moment, Please get/download a windows ( 8/8.1/10) "image" file ( I.E an ISO file ), same windows version as you got currently installed.
Also get a USB with min of 4GB(win8/8.1) that you don't have any important info on it ( it will get wipe when you'll create the bootable usb )

waiting to read updates from you.

[cpasoft]

It's seems that the laptop are trying to boot from network as the first option. The PXE error is because there is not a PXE server on your network, so your laptop is not able to boot from it.

You must reorder the boot order on the bios, or disable the network boot (pxe).

Regards.

[cpasoft]

Ops, I've not read all your post...
It seems you have deleted the UEFI boot partition or something like that.
You must create a new one.

[cpasoft]

Hope this could help you to recover your boot:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/seven-ways-to-set-up-multi-booting-with-windows-8-and-linux/

It's the same under Windows 10...

[orange_angel]

Thanks so much cpasoft and Gps3dx for your help!

Gps3dx wrote:
Hello,

• Are your ssd/hdd ( the drive with the OS ) is formatted as GPT OR MBR ?
  if you've installed ubuntu, you must know how to boot it from a USB in a "LIVE" mode -> open Gparted, check there, and report here.
  
• what windows version you currently got installed ? 8/8.1/10 ?
  
• Have you made a CLEAN install of windows or have you stayed with the "pre-installed" windows 8/8.1 that came from asus ?
  

The answers:
1. I don't know. I'm not able to check because neither using a Live USB with Ubuntu or an USB with a Win 10 iso tells me anything about the SSD drive where both Ubuntu and Win is installed. I've tried with Gparted and fdisk and some other command on Ubuntu and diskpart in the Win command prompt. It''s just the regular HD and the USB that's listed
2. The Windows version currently installed is Win 10.
3. I've not made a clean install of Windows. I stayed with the pre-installed Win 8.1, upgraded to Win 10, made room on the SSD for Ubuntu and installed Ubuntu in addition.

So to sum things up. The SSD drive that I want to boot from is recognized by Bios, but neither Ubuntu or Win on USB finds the SSD drive and apparently neither does the laptops startup process. What could be the reason for that? Obviously the SSD was findable for everyone until yesterday.