Strange G73jh boot issue.

I've recently been having this issue for the last couple of weeks. I submitted an email to Asus (basically what you see below this) describing my boot issue. My system is an unmodded G73jh-A2 with 2 500 GB HDD's. I didn't see a similar issue so I figured I'd post it here.

"I've recently been having an issue when booting the computer where the Asus logo image will hang for a longer duration than it normally would and then the logo is replaced by a black screen with the "Reboot and select proper boot device" message indicating that there appears to be no available windows installation to boot to. After shutting the computer down using the power button after the message appears, I would enter the bios and occasionally the system won't recognize the presence of either HDD as a location to boot from. At this stage, I would shut down the computer again, unplug the AC power cord and remove the battery. After waiting approximately 30 seconds - 1 minute, I would place the battery back into the unit and plug it in, turn the power on and the machine would generally seems to be able to boot windows normally. More rarely, however, windows itself will crash and the "reboot and select proper boot device" will be displayed the next time I try to boot windows. I'm currently running bios version 206 on my machine. Would updating the bios fix this issue? It seems unlikely that both hardrives would be failing at the same times, and all of the evidence indicates that it may be a bios issue. I'm unsure as to why this is only now presenting itself (in the last month) when I've had the machine since last May."

Thank you for your assistance.

My current plan is to do a full back-up in the next few days and then update the bios to a newer version. Then if something doesn't go properly or it doesn't fix it I can then consider an RMA without worry of losing all of my data.

Any of you have any ideas? I greatly appreciate it.

 

Sounds like a HDD controller problem. Back up your data immediately (externally preferably) and RMA to ASUS.

 

As I write this, I'm backing up all my important data. I kind of wished it wasn't something hardware related but I'd rather get it taken care of. I might still try updating the bios cause I've never tried it before and I guess I figure I might as well now before RMAing the computer in.

 

I get this whenever I overclock too far and my CPU causes my system to lock up. I restart and instead of my custom logo at startup I get the stock Asus one and it gives me ^^ that message you get.

I dont remove the battery or anything I just hit the power button and restart and it works everytime. I dunno why it does it for me but I just try not to cause a lockup.

Never caused me to lose the entire system or HDD last time was 2 months ago though so just backup and dont worry about it until worse case scenario.

 

Yeah, I'm still waiting on Asus's input on the scenario. Sometimes it happens once a day and sometimes it happens 3 times in 20 minutes. There definitely seems to be something wrong with it, but it only started doing this a couple of weeks ago. It has become more frequent than before. Yesterday my bios was actually only recognizing the one HDD (not the boot drive) which was a change from both not being detected. This only happened one time though.

Thanks for all of the input.

 

I had this last week too. But in my case the OCZ Vertex 2 E 120GB was broken.
When i booted first time it loaded Windows till the first black screen after the windows is flying together, before welcome screen. Then i saw, that the HDD LED was on for a min on and then it turned off. After rebooting it couldn't find the SSD (no bootable device screen).
For a case that my HDD is broken i have my unused original WindowsHDD to boot and it worked at the same SATA Port as before the SSD was plugged in.
After that i put the SSD in an external USB drive and stored my DATA via Knoppix (Windows may worked too). But i recognized, that the SSD was offline after a while at USB like booting Windows before from that drive. But here it was easy to plug the USB off and on and it was online again. BTW SMART DATA had no problem. No extra space if cells are destroyed were used at this time.
So if u got another drive try to boot from it like i did. May it helps ya not to RMA the whole PC.

BTW: I got the german i5 Model which was published first here. But i have the third MB ^^. Last one is replaced in Aug'10.