G50V will not start up

I'm looking for some advice to trouble shoot my son's computer problems.

He has a G50v running windows 7 (it originally came with Vista). I'm not really sure what preceded the problems but right now it will not start up correctly.

Most often nothing happens after the on button is pressed except for a couple of lights (power button, the runner, lightening bolt, and the republic of gamers icon). The hard drive light comes on for only a brief second. On repeated attempts to start up sometimes the num lock and cap lock lights will come on and stay on. It seems like its frozen or stalled. There's no noise from drives. But I can hear the fan.

If we turn it off and wait a few minutes (I've been unplugging and removing the battery also), after pushing the start button the "republic of gamers" icon comes up on the screen and then the screen goes dark except for the message: "Missing operating system" (I know this does not look good.) The hardrive light will light a few times very, very briefly before this screen.

We tried starting up from a Knoppix disk we had laying around and it did start up with that, but his drive did not show up. Again we had to wait a few minutes after a forced shutdown before it would start up. I just tried to start up with it again and even after waiting for more than 5 minutes it did not start up this time.

He tried putting in a windows recovery disk and it seems to have frozen about half way through the progress bar with the heading "windows is loading files..."

I have no idea where to start with a problem like this. Can anyone help? Thanks!

 

Can you get into the bios without any problems. The fact that you can boot off a linux cd leads me to think that the problem is that the hard drive needs replacing. I'd run diagnostics on the drive either from a bootable utility, hdd manufacturers usually offer one or by putting the drive into another computer.

 

The computer will not start up with any consistency even with the Linux CD or in bios. We were able to get it to start up twice in the bios and once in linux CD in about 20 or more attempts. We have to shut it down by holding the power button for 5 or more seconds and when we have tried to boot right away and after unplugging the battery and power for a few minutes it will not start up with any consistency.

This computer has 2 - 250 gig harddrives. I believe they are configured to run as RAID? Does this make any difference in diagnosing?

Thanks,

 

As long as you do not boot from the HDDs, nope. If the boot from a linux disc didn't work though, the problem is likely elsewhere.

 

Thanks for your help.

An update. We tried removing both harddrives last night and the computer will boot up consistently whether using that Knoppix disk or without.

I imagine this is good news as it seems to isolate the problem to one or both of the drives.

We then tried putting one drive in at a time and I believe we have isolated the problem to one drive. It hangs up as described above. The other one does not, however it will not start up the computer either.

So, my next question is- how do we go about getting his computer back up and running? Because its currently configured to run on two harddrives in RAID. It seems both drives are required for this?

I'm thinking he does not really need this set up and instead a single drive would probably work okay for him.

Could you offer suggestions on how we should proceed to get his computer back up and running?

Thanks!

 

You will need to re-install windows. I'm not certain you'll be able to get the data that was on the drives if you were running the drives in RAID0.

 

You may want to try the working drive in the other drive bay to rule out the other port being the problem (instead of the other drive).

When you run RAID0 you need to be prepared for total data loss due to array failure (from metadata corruption or dead drives), so I hope you have any important data backed up.

If the drive is the problem, you will need a replacement drive with as similar specs as you can find. Then recreate an array and reinstall windows.