Asus N56VZ "bricked" after setting hard drive BIOS password - please help

Hey guys - I have a N56VZ. I have a mechanical hard drive in the optical drive slot and a solid state drive in the regular hard drive slot.

I decided to add a hard drive password in the BIOS. After I set the password and "saved and quit" the setup, all my computer will do is show a black screen. Power light comes on, can't get into BIOS, can't boot from any media, no nothing. I took apart the entire laptop (see pictures below) and tried to find the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS but it was nowhere to be found.

I tried everything possible. Boot with CD drive in optical drive, mechanical drive in primary hard drive slot like stock-nothing.

Unplugging, power button, remove battery, power button, nothing works at all.

I called ASUS support and they want me to RMA it, but I'm not sure what's going to happen because I've already torn it apart. I have to assume it's the BIOS because as soon as I changed the hard drive to have a password and saved and exited the BIOS all of this started to happen.

Is there anyway to reset the BIOS to defaults? I have not found the CMOS battery or jumper ANYWHERE on this laptop.

Is my only resort to RMA this thing? I'm so frustrated! This is my last resort before I ship it off to ASUS on Monday. Any tips or things to try will be GREATLY appreciated.

Thank you so much everyone.I hope this community can help!

 

Shameful self bump. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

Have you seen this thread, and especially this post?

I doubt there is no CMOS battery, it must be on the other side of the mainboard.

 

Thank you for posting that coercitiv. I tried everything within that thread to no avail. I may also have a dead motherboard. Guess I'll ship it in after all.