G73JH: Will not boot after Flashing to 213 (But not a brick)

Folks,
Need some help. I have a G73JH that has been giving me issues for literally years. Despite all my research it was only when I was just about to send it back to ASUS that I discovered this GSOD trend. Really weird as I have spent hours searching for answers and only now, after two years, have I found this topic.

Anyways, went to start the repair process for the GSOD by flashing to 213 (I do not know what my old version was). Downloaded 213 from ASUS, put it on a FAT32 formatted USB drive, and booted into the BIOS. Picked 'easy flash', picked the USB drive and picked 'BIOS213'. Everything seemed to go normally, deleted old BIOS, installed new ones, gave me the alert that it was about to shut down, and then it shut down.

So looked like everything went well, until I restarted. Windows 8 (64 bit) then promptly went into the automatic repair process, checked the HD for errors, and then provided a msg saying it could not fix the issue, and gave me an option to restore from a restore point. That did not work.

So, the good news is that it is not a brick. The bad news is that it will not fully boot.

The only thing I have tried thus far is redoing the flashing of the BIOS. I did it once, with the same file and the same USB drive.

Any advise would be appreciated.

Follow-up;

BIOS Version: G73JH 213
VBIOS Version: 012.020.000.032.0383.G730
EC Version: b22c180203

Also, F8 at start-up does not seem to work.

 

Check your EFI setting in the BIOS setup by hitting F2 as you power it on.

 

If you asking about the UEFI setting, it is disabled. Turning it on led me to the same 'Automatic Repair' msg I received previously.

I tried booting to my Windows 8 Pro DVD and trying to load a previous restore point. I was able to restore it, but then when I rebooted same issue. I am almost positive this is a BIOS and or hardware issue but I am not anything but an average computer user, so what do I know. But before I updated to 213 it booted normally all the time, it just froze and/or gave me the GSOD after a short period of time.

 

From what you've described it sounds like a software issue with your windows boot manager, not a bad BIOS flash. If you can get into the BIOS setup and change things that is a good sign. The old F8 boot menu on windows is now shift+f8 for win8, and on all but the slowest computers the time you have to press the key combination is too short to catch. I think you probably need to enable EFI (or disable, whatever it was set to when it last successfully booted) in the BIOS and then attempt to repair with the install DVD. Not restore from a restore point, but do a startup repair under system recovery options.

 

You'll probably have to reinstall the operating system to fix that issue. I've had the same thing happen when i updated the bios on an hp dv9000. Everything went perfect but it kept booting to the recovery partition (which was vista). An os reload solved that issue. If it were me i'd ditch windows 8, if your computer isn't touch screen there's no reason to have an os based around a touch interface.

 

Ok, I am doing a 'SYSTEM REFRESH' that will keep most of my stuff but remove all my installed stuff. luckily just about everything is backed up. In regards to how I ended up with Windows 8, it is sort of a long story. I bought this computer on EBay, likely from someone who had grown tired of the GSOD issue. They had taken the original Windows 7 32 bit install and upgraded it to 64 bit w/o including the install disks. Once I started having all these issues I was about at my wit's end. Then I got the opportunity to get Windows 8 cheap, and I was hoping that would fix the issue. It did not. So I lack the ability to go back to Windows 7 short of buying install disks from Asus.

So we will see how this 'refresh' works. If it gets the darn thing running I will be happy, I have everything backed up.

Update: Well, it is booting now. Now I have to go through and update all of the drivers, reinstall applications, etc. I'll report back on whether the BIOS update and the system 'refresh' has eliminated the GSOD.

Thanks all for your help, so far so good.