G50 Second Drive and POST problems

Hi all,

I bought my wife a G50 in January or so and up until now it has been rock solid. This morning she was using it and it locked up on her. I tried to get it back up and running, but nothing worked so I had to power it off. Once I fired it back up, it would not even POST. It would make a strange sound (some sort of beeping) and just keep on doing it kind of sounded like an old record skipping and playing the same part of a song over and over again. I ended up pulling the cover off to make sure the RAM and drives were seated properly and then fired it back up. This time it did boot, but it would POST the first time (make the explosion sound and show the republic of gamers logo) but then go back to a black screen and start the process over again a second time then boot into Vista.

After it boots it works just fine except that the second drive does not show up, either in Windows Explorer or in Disk Management. It doesn't even show up in Device Manager. However the disk does show up in the BIOS just fine. I pulled the second drive and put in an external enclosure and the drive fired right up on my desktop and all of the data was intact. So I copied it off and formatted the drive to try again. Still no luck. I get the same issue. I even downloaded the newest BIOS and Flashed them, but still no luck. If I pull the second drive out completely the machine boots up just fine, with only one POST and then right into Vista. I did some digging, but haven't seen much on this issue. Just wondering if there is anything else I should try before I call into tech support?

Thanks for any help.
Dave

 

Oof, I had a similar problem with my G51; except it never would go to POST, it just cycled BIOS. I ended up having to trick BEst Buy in to giving me an exchange.

Do you have any other laptops that you can pop your hard drives in to? I'd do that (to se if it's a problem with them) and run an error check.

 

I don't have any other laptops, but I do have a USB external drive. Like I said, I put the second drive (the one that isn't recognized) in the drive and all of the data was there and it showed right up. I then formatted it fresh from another machine and re-installed it, but still no luck. It's looking like this machine may go back for service.

 

What about the primary drive? THat's the one that's a little more important.

At the very least switch the primary drive for the secondary slot and the secondary drive for the primary slot and try to boot; or but the Primary in the enclosure and see if BIOS lets you boot from USB.

 

So my laptop went back to ASUS for repair. They have had it for over three weeks now. They offered me a G50VT-X5 but with the 2.15 processor. I told them no way (mine had the 2.53). Now they are saying that since I didn't take their crappy replacement that I have to wait for a motherboard for my machine and have no ETA on the part. Seems like this is standard ASUS customer service to me. (

I'll never make the mistake of buying another one of their products.

 

However, 98% of users will never stress their CPU with prolonged operations that will result in a perceptible difference in performance (excluding benchmarking) between the 2.53GHz and 2.15GHz. The G50 is in the process of likely being EOL'd and has had a sales problem with units piling up at distributors, thus the lack of motherboards for replacement parts (same issue with the G1 series over the past 18 months, and why the G5x are being regularly offered as replacements for failed G1 gpu units).

You have every reason to be unhappy over the cpu change, but the fact is that Asus did offer you a new (essentially comparable) replacement in lieu of telling you "too bad" and keeping your system on their shelf away from you, for an indefinite period of time waiting for parts that may not even show up for weeks/months. In my book, that isn't such bad service after all.

 

I agree that the CPU isn't that huge of an issue in itself, but on top of that the replacement only had a 320GB hard drive where mine had two 250's so again, it isn't a "similar" unit as they had stated in their email. I'm willing to bet that the model they offered me sold for at least $200 less than the model I purchased. Then to top it off, I get the line that this is the only model available. Come on, ASUS is a huge PC company and they only have this one model available. What they really mean to say is, this is what we hope you take and aren't smart enough to notice the difference in specifications.

I understand that parts may be hard to come by but to hold out for three weeks, offer a lesser model, and then still not even give an ETA of parts is unacceptable. No business is in the market of giving things away, but a simple update at any time in this process would have been a huge step in the right direction. It shouldn't take several emails and phone calls to find out when an eight month old laptop is going to be repaired under warranty. Just my two cents though.

 

Not quite....
Each Asus global unit is semi-independent (i.e. Asus North America, Asus Europe, etc) and import product from Asus corporate in Taiwan whatever models (in large unit orders) from the overall catalog they wish for sales and distribution within their limited market. The remaining overstock of the G50 that Asus NA is offering everyone must be that singular model - and sadly they aren't going to write up a single or low count unit purchase order from Taiwan (who wouldn't accept it anyway ) for a direct RMA replacement. Asus NA probably were told that new parts were coming through the supply chain, and then it turned out that it wasn't going to happen. As for the (lack of) ETA issue, this is like retailers who have product on Backorder - they have no idea when the product might show up from the distributor so can't forward that info onto their customers because it doesn't exist for them.

Your troubles are unfortunate, that much is certain, and Asus NA does need to do a better job of updating their RMAs as recent reports around here have demonstrated.

 

Sorry to look backward and I know you have already sent it back but you could have tried this. It sounds like the same problem. Did you recently upgrade your bios?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=313199

 

I did see that post, but only after I had RMA'd it and sent it back. I didn't upgrade my BIOS when this happened, but I also didn't try that fix either, so I'm not sure if it would have worked or not. They claim they are replacing the motherboard, but it isn't in stock, but I still have no status or ETA other than waiting on parts.

Sounds about on par to all the other peoples experiences.