A72Jr Bad Flash

I was trying to help a friend out and a do a clean Win7 install, updated drivers, firmwares etc. I noticed Asus had a built in bios updater, and his was ancient in computer years and it seems like the newer ones had legitimate benefits so I downloaded it, unzipped it in C:\ and restarted. No warnings, no messages, no errors. The BIOS flash goes through, all good, "Rebooting in 2 seconds", comp never turns on again, at all. No response. It's like it's got no electrical to it at all. Reading *NOW* I see it's a pretty common issues, the using the ASUS built in bios flasher from a filesystem that 95+% of end users would be using, NTFS, has a very obvious bug. So, I'm wondering what my options are here and I'm hoping to hear from people that have dealt with a similar issue with an asus laptop in the 09/10/11 range.

I've read a lot of things, most common is just RMA. My friend has no idea when he bought it, and no receipt. Vaguely remember 'right before summer really got going about two years ago.' How lax is ASUS in possibly RMA'ing something that may be on the cusp of just having gone out of warranty, or doing warranty work without ultra precise levels of if anyone has experience with this?

Also, what are my DYI options? I'm tempted to take it apart and pull the CMOS battery, but I've read that's useless. I've also read that most laptops come with crisis rom versions of the bios that can be regenerated in case of bad flashes but also read that asus disabled this feature for some reason. Also read that just leaving a fat flash drive with a rom will regenerate the bios, not sure on procedure here. So if someone has actually recovered from an NTFS bios flash using ASUS EZFlash, would really appreciate some guidance.

Thanks for reading, and I apprecaite any insight into this so I'm not buying my friend a new $600 laptop

 

This thread may be of some help. http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/658504-asus-n61jv-bad-bios-flash-brick-3.html , One of the members who posted evgasr2 seems to have a lot of experience with similar issues. You will not be able to Private message him due to not having 5 posts yet, but there is an email address in his profile.

 

He's also banned, which kind of sucks. That's a lot of posts for the dude to turn out to be some shifty scammer. Kind of doubt he'll reply but it's worth a shot.

 

Bump

Hoping someone actually has dealt with this personally that I can talk to or knows someone that has.