G50Vt-x5 reboots at BIOS after noticing second hard drive

I have recently purchased a X5 at a local BestBuy and all seemed to work well. A SATA HD from another notebook was promptly installed in the second bay, and it worked flawlessly. As I had been using Windows 7 in this first notebook and had liked it, I figured it wouldn't be a big deal to install it on the ASUS. The 64-bit version installed fine, and aside from the usual incompatibilities (LCD, function keys, webcam), there was nothing unusual. Then it all went downhill from there.

I figured I could do without the LCD, but not the webcam (home's a few thousand miles away) or the function keys (try changing your volume ingame without those!), so back to Vista it was. As dual-boot is a must, I inserted Ubuntu's LiveCD in the tray and rebooted only to find out that the notebook went through the BIOS process twice, and shortly thereafter gparted (ubuntu's graphical partition manager) showed only one hard drive as being installed.

Since this incident the second hard drive has not been recognized by anything, and whenever it is present the notebook has to "start" twice: the BIOS loads, then the screen turns black (no backlight), goes through the BIOS again about one second later and boots normally. It is not an issue with my old hard drive, since I've swapped both and the problem is still there (except now it boots from the old one). I've looked at the BIOS settings right after the first start, and the HD is present; the second time, it's gone.

I find it hard to believe that there is something wrong with the hardware, but I couldn't find anything relevant in the BIOS settings or even update it (for some reason EzFlash does not accept the v.213 BIOS from the ASUS website). It also does not matter what I try to boot - be it a CD or a HD, the problem still lingers.

Has this happened to anyone else? I couldn't find information about it anywhere on the web. I reinstalled from the Recovery DVD twice, but no luck...

Any ideas?

 

5Char .

 

It worked! Thank you VERY much! I was already having day nightmares involving the technical support...

On a side note.. would you know what is the reason for this bug?

 

In my head (I am a programmer) I do but getting it into something that even sounds plausible..... uh.... Yeah anyways when i did it myself it just seemed intuitive but i couldnt remember the second time, the swap worked but as i said GenTechPC had the instructions posted elsewhere already.

 

It's a BIOS bug, but as Gentech originally posted, it can be fixed by loading the user default.

 

Noteably loading and saving twice and on the same power cycle.

 

Well, I am (hopefully) to start CS in the next year, so it would be great to have an insight on the inner workings of the BIOS... well, that is, if you don't mind sharing what you have in mind!

 

Thanks for the tip!!!

 

Clutch i really need your help, i got a 2nd HDD, installed it, it shows it was detected but it doesnt show on my computer. can someone help?

 

Go to Control Panel->Administrative tools-->Computer Management--> on the left click Disk Management. (I know there is a shorter way to get here I just can't remember it atm...) if its shown there it might be shown as Unallocated. Right click and press Format, go through the short series of prompts and have it formatted as NTFS, it should now show up under My Computer. Had to do this when I installed my new drive in the G51.