UX31A won't boot, please HELP

Hi, hope someone here can help me. I have a UX31A which was working fine for the past 9 months (since new). Yesterday it froze during normal operation in Windows 8.1, so I powered it off using the power button. When I tried to turn it on again, the Asus logo came up and the spinning circle of dots which normal, but it wouldn't make it beyond that point. I left it for a long time, then powered off again by holding the power key but it still wouldn't start.

Occasionally it starts up saying "Preparing Automatic Repair" but will not make it past this screen even if left for hours. Occasionally it will boot directly into the BIOS settings.

Things I have tried:

1. Powering up, pressing ESC to get into the Bios, it is version 219 which is most recent I believe. I have tried resetting Bios settings to optimized defaults but nothing changed.

2. Have tried powering up with a two different bootable USB sticks (which work to boot up other machines) containing Rescue options (utitilities, antivirus), but even though I can select the USB stick to boot the machine (pressing ESC when booting up, then select the USB stick as the boot device), nothing changes, still immediately goes to "Preparing Automatic Repair" and gets stuck.

3. Pressing F9 while powering up. Displays Windows 8 logo (4 blue squares) and "Please wait" but does nothing beyond that.

Any ideas? I have a lot of personal data on this machine that I'd like to salvage somehow.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Sounds like your raid faild.

 

Thanks for your reply. Here's an update. I went online with a chat representative from Asus who took me through steps designed to reset the notebook, including removing the power supply and holding the power button down for 5-6 seconds, restarting and loading BIOS defaults, then trying to get into the Windows repair environment (WinRE) using F9, but these did nothing (stuck at windows logo, "Please Wait"). Asus has provided me with an RMA number for repair.

Since then however, I noticed that after a long wait that WinRE does come up sometimes, but not much can be accomplished through it. Refresh option does not work as it says the disk is locked. Reset option fails as it can't access the disk properly. I can get a C: prompt, but diskpart says there are no disks. I tried using a Win8 setup on a USB stick: The correct partitions are listed, but they cannot be accessed for installing Windows, formatting, deleting, or anything else.

If this is a RAID failure, is the RAID on the SSD card? Is there any way to get the data back? Thanks.

 

Short answer, yes.

No, thats the disadvantage of RAID0.

BTW, is that the 256gig model?

 

This is the 128gb model. I tried something else. I used EZFlash built into the BIOS and noticed that when asked to select the BIOS update file, I can actually see and browse through all my directories and files from the SDD. Why can they be seen under these circumstances but not through WinRE? Still no way to back them up? Or failing that, wipe them before sending the unit off for repair?

What about removing the SDD and using some kind of adapter cable to access the files on it?

Thanks

 

Any news On This? Just Got the same issue and i must revolver my data. I dont Care if i need to buy a new laptop - only the data is important.
Did you end up fixing it???

 

Your best bet to get to the data is to use either Mini Windows XP (found on Hiren's Boot CD) or a Linux live disc/disk (any distribution will work; Ubuntu or Linux Mint will probably be the easiest to use). That gives you a minimalist OS to use to access your directories and copy data from the drive to another storage device.

 

Hi,
Did anyone find a solution to this?
Having an identical problem, Asus UX31a won't boot after a failed update on Win 8.1.
Attempted to boot from USB and CD but i don't make it past the windows icon...

After a number of emails Asus just want to send it for repair but it's outside the warrenty and it was bought outside my country so they wouldn't cover it anyway....

Any input would be much appreciated? Even updates on if your issues were software/hardware failures.

Thanks
John