G73 not showing boot drive

My G73JH crashed earlier today and now it can't seem to find the boot HDD
If I try to boot I get this message:
"Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key"
When I go to the setup utility it shows one 500Gb HDD in boot position 1 and the DVD in boot position 2 but if I go see the boot options and the SATA configuration it only shows the DVD in sata port 1 and the HDD on port 4. There is no trace of the other HDD and all the other ports are empty.

Starting to freak out a little here.

 

Get a w7 disc and run startup repair, see: http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-7-download-links-just-like-vista-before.html

How To Easily Repair Windows 7 Boot Problems Using Startup Repair

 

Get any disk read error messages? I just had to replace one of the stock segates drives in mine. Wasnt being found. Turned out to be 16x bad blocks and corrupt MBR on my boot drive. Ordered a momentus from newegg and shes running new again. Using the old drive for data now.

 

It came as a surprise. I was scanning something from a USB scanner and while the data was transfering, I got impatient and moved a 1Mb file from one folder to another at the same time. Crash of the century, everything froze, it has been refusing to boot since then. I downloaded the Win7 DVD from ALLurGroceries's link and tried it with a USB boot drive but all I got was a flashing white underscore on a black screen. I'm trying another boot at the moment. I'll probably check for a new drive online this weekend if I'm still not booting.

My G73JH has been virtually trouble free since I got it back in June 2010.... until today.

 

Hm if you're getting a flashing underscore it probably isn't set up right... maybe try it on a different computer to see if you can at least boot the windows 7 installer. If not try again, or just burn a DVD.

 

The 2nd attempt worked. It's booting Win7 Installer via the USB drive.
I ran the Startup Repairs (which didn't see my windows partition) but when trying to boot without the USB drive the computer still gives me the same error message. If I tried to load drivers manually while in the Startup Repair my C drive is missing completly and my second HDD has become the C drive which seams to point to a dead HDD.

This is the Startup Repair log:
Root cause found
This partition table does not have a valid system partition
repair action: partition table repair
result: completed successfully, error code = 0x0
time taken: 1451ms

I ran the Startup Repair 3 times and the log is the same every time, which makes sens since there is no WIndows installed on what is now considered the C drive.

 

You can try the suggestion here:
Invalid system partition - Windows 7 Forums

Then you will need to run the boot repair again, or follow this post:
Invalid system partition - Page 2 - Windows 7 Forums

 

Reset BIOS settings? Try putting the HDD in the other bay? (thus checking to see if its the SATA port's issue).

 

manualy set boot priority on hdd 0 , than reflash BIOS

 

I'll swap the 2 HDDs during my lunch hour to test the sata port.

*EDIT*
Sata port working fine.
switched the HDDs and the issue remains the same
It's starting more and more to look like a fried HDD.

Weird thing... Both HDD are identical but they are not the same color. One is dark blue and the other is more greenish.... same part number though so probably nothing.

 

Try booting a linux livecd (ubuntu) or liveusb (unetbootin) to see if you can get any data off that drive before calling it a total loss.

Did you get a chance to try setting the partition to active, and seeing if the boot repair worked after that?

 

I had exactly the same problem with my G73JH last week.

Tried to swap SATA port, using it as external HDD, resetting BIOS, updating BIOS: nothing worked, still not detecting the HDD...

Had to buy an SSD, but still want to get back all the stuff I had on the HDD. If anyone had this problem and managed to solve it, all help would be really apreciated!

 

That was actually my next plan for this evening.

I'll also try to hook up the HDD to a Sata/USB adapter to see if I can access it this way to copy some stuff(I doubt it but still worth a shot)

 

same here.. getting random BSOD's once/3 times a week, HDD is then undetectable, have to restart to get it show (double restart), the original Seagate which came with laptop is undetectable in primary bay as well..

Some weird stuff going on in this laptop, stable bios, updated drivers.. nothing cutting this !

-Mel

 

Hopefully it's not too late (didn't see this til now), but it just sounds like a corrupted partition table to me. Try TestDisk - CGSecurity and see if you can rebuild the MBR, you can do this under a live linux environment if you have one.

 

This is why I <3 the Acronis products. I have True Image Home 2011 & Disk Director 11 on a bootable USB. I'm currently in the process of backing up my JH so I can pop out an XT drive from the SW and copy by boot drive over to it. Let's see how much time is saved using the NAND cache.

 

If its not detecting the HDD in BIOS, its either a dead drive or somethings up w/ G73's mobo. Tried the drive in another PC/Laptop? Also, google/youtube "hdd recovery freezer method", and see if it helps get it working for long enough so you can back it up.

 

Mine is in RMA right now for this. I tried about 3 different drives and same problem, but mine is on the secondary drive, not the C drive.

 

So it seems to be a motherboard problem then... Hopefully this doesn't start happening to all the G73s. Which model do you have and when did u get it?

 

I actually sent it in because my fans have been on 100% ever since I got it back from an RMA a few months back. The hard drive issue started a few weeks ago and that was enough to finally get me to send it in again.

G73JH-A2 from Gentech in feb 10, but this is the second mobo not the original one. The drive tested with errors when this first started, then I took it out connected with a usb to my desktop, fixed the errors and reformatted. I put it back in and it would come and go but never reproduced errors. This leads me to believe that it is a bad connection on the sata ribbon or the mobo, which in my case is already bad.

 

Sorry for the lack of reply, been caught up with work.
After more testing, the HDD is beyond repair to me. I could always try to replace the head unit but it would void warranty so I won't go there.

My RMA has been logged with Asus VIP Service so I should be getting a new HDD sometime next week.

After that I'll see if the restore disks I burned when I got the notebook are actually worth the 6 DVDs it took to burn them or if like a few people have mentioned on this forum, they are utterly useless.

If it doesn't work well.... I already downloaded a Win7 disk for backup attemps so I'll take this opportunity to do a clean install.

Once everything is back to working order I will however buy a new smaller HDD and create a full bootable backup drive... and also make a decent backup of my G73's 2nd HDD.... there wasn't too many important stuff on the main HDD but the other one has 400Gb worth of games and wedding pictures/movie which I don't want to lose.

My only complain is that I won't be able to fully erase the deffective drive and it does contain all my bank and credit information. If Asus and Seagate follow their official failure testing procedure then the drive should be overwritten with zeros for testing purpose and if deffective holes should be drilled in the drive but you always wonder how much you can trust a minimum wage, bored out of his mind tech worker. I would have prefered to erase the disk myself but it's hard to do when you can't connect it to a PC and I don't want to void the warranty by damaging it myself.
I wonder if the Medical Imagery department at work would let me MRI the drive between 2 patients...

 

Why can't you remove the drive and put it in an external enclosure or just hook it up to another computer? Taking the drive out won't void your warranty.

Also for the exact reason you mentioned I always encrypt my laptop HDDs with dm-crypt / LUKS on Linux. With windows home premium you need 3rd party software or an upgraded version of windows for decent encryption.

 

As I had mentionned in an earlier post, I took the drive out and tried connecting it to another PC but it is not recognized. I suppose I should have formulated it differently in my last post. I CAN take the drive out and connect it to another PC but it doesn't yield any result so I can't flush the drive with a cleanup software.

 

Did you look at drive management on the other computer to see if the drive was recognized, even if it didn't mount?

If the drive is toast, there's little reason to worry. Part of refurbishing a drive includes low-level formatting it, if it's even repairable.

 

I have this same exact issue with a RMA replacement G73JH except I'm using a Vertex 2 SSD and I can power off and on until the Bios reconizes it and all works well.

Think my issue is the HDD or the MOBO?

 

I think it's SSD Firmware

 

Well the new HDD arrived today. It's not quite the same thing, instead of shipping me a new Seagate Momentus they sent me a WD Scorpio. Oh well... it's a 500Gb 7200rpm drive so I'm happy.

At first the Asus tech told me that as soon as my RMA form was validated they would send me my new power supply... good intentions but not quite there yet

Giving the restore DVDs a try, so far so good at 15%...
I know a clean install is always best but I never had any performance issue with the base setup (although I did uninstall a few things) so why change it...

*EDIT* 52%
*EDIT* 87%

*EDIT* Restore partition is installed. Now onto the restoration itself... 27% and going...

Well well..... looks like those restore DVDs are worth the 6 DVDs it took to burn them after all.
Windows7 is fully restored and functional.

All that remains now is to uninstall some crap, reinstall some other things and everything will be back the way it should be.

*LAST EDIT*
I do have 1 critic about the Scorpio HDD Asus sent me.... it's noisy. The Momentus HDD was dead silent but the Scorpio has a constant light crunching noise.

 

My fiance and I both have a G73JH-RBBX05. About 3 months ago, this same thing happened. Her hard drive was not being detected in the bios. We've tried swapping them to the other sata bay but still won't get detected. In all of God's graces, we got it to boot once after powering it off and on for about an hour, removing the battery, unplugging the AC, etc.

I ran HD Tune Pro on her laptop, and got a lot of Ultra DMA CRC Error counts on the drive. What it basically means is that the sata cable might be crapping out. I checked out the G73 disassembly guide and saw that the SATA connector for both bays use only one SATA FCC (see page 2-23 of the disassembly guide).

After about a month of investigating, and of slowly increasing DMA CRC Error counts, and after using SpinRite on it, we figured out the barbaric solution to make her laptop boot. When the error occurs (HDD disappears), we turn the laptop off, then swing it back and forth for about 10 seconds, then the HDD gets detected. Kinda crazy @_@.

Anyway, just sharing my story. Hard to RMA the laptop or the seagate harddrive because we're both living in the Philippines

Good luck guys! YMMV! (your mileage may vary!)

 

I am running two OSZ SSD's and just reinstalled Win7 anmd all my software because of the exact same error. I don't want to do this again and am interested if someone has actually figured out what is going on?

 

OK I'm officially pissed.
All my games were installed on my 2nd HDD so no problems.... I just need to reinstall windows on the new C drive and my games will all be safe and sound.. and they are, sort of....

All my games were installed on the F drive and work perfectly but for god only knows what reason.... all my save games were on the C drive so... all gone...
Bioshock, Bioshock2, Modern Warfare 1 and 2, World at war, Black ops, Mass effect 1 and 2, Arkham Asylum, Crysis 1 and 2, Far Cry 2, Just Cause 2.... everything....gone.

While my wife is quite happy that the computer is working again, the nerd inside me is raging...

 

I have suffered with this issue for a couple of weeks now & decided to reinstall everything. Of course my first reaction was that the SSDs were at fault, but, I see now that it doesn't seem to matter what type of hard drives are installed in the G73.

I bought it in Nov '10 and installed the SSDs right away. From then until now everything worked great. Last week I started recieving the "Boot Device" message mentioned above. I simply restarted with the power key and everything worked fine (for about an hour and then it occurred again.)

I tried doing a full WIndows back, which always triggered the failure before finishing; and, running a NORTON 360 virus scan, which also triggered it.

Finally, I got so frustrated I wiped my bigger SSD (drive C and started again. So far, C: is OK; but now my smaller SSD (D is starting to act funny by not being present after start-up. It seems as though a "restart" fails to find it. But, powering off and on a couple of times seems to eventually work. What the heck is going on here?

I am a Comp Sci Grad student (software) and I need this machine to get my work done; unfortunatley, I am not a hardware guru.

Do I have to become one to solve this? Using 3 full days to wipe/reinstall everything is not a very good long term solution. (I have about 100GB of software to install on C

Is there something else I should be looking at?

Please help!!

 

Have you double checked to see if the settings in the BIOS is good? Perhaps the boot order is incorrect, or that the drive setting has been on the wrong one (AHCI vs. emulated)

Other than that, the only thing I can think of is the SB itself, which rarely malfunctions.