HELP - Asus Zenbook UX32VD crashed, and now BIOS options are all greyed out!!!

Hi everyone,

Just joined up to post my call for help here, so hoping I can draw on some of the experience here for help!
My ASUS recently crashed and kept boot looping into the BIOS.
Turns out my SSD had died. (Something I was able to later confirm by putting the drive into an enclosure to test)
I could edit options in the BIOS while I was troubleshooting and tried numerous things to get me out of the BIOS loop.
Eventually, the BIOS rebooted and all my options were greyed out, and it remains that way now.
Nothing is editable except the USER password.

I have tried unplugging the CMOS battery, no joy. Tried unplugging it for almost a week to be sure it had discharged, still no joy - it's remembering everything including the passwords I set up while troubleshooting (as a seperate issue - anyone know how to kill the BIOS memory on these?)

Anyway... I have a new SSD, and a USB DVD drive to install Windows 8.1, but no option to allow USB boot in the BIOS as all my options are disabled.
I tried holding ESC which brings me to the boot menu, but USB attachments are not recognized.
I'm able to enter the BIOS flashing screen on boot up by holding the F4 key on restart, but once again it can only see the internal SSD (24GB boot drive) and not the USB keys with the firmware on them.

I'm attaching shots of the BIOS screens. Is it something to do with the fact that the BIOS is in 'USER mode'? If so, I see no way to get out of it.
I guess if I could reset the BIOS that would work, but that battery seems to hold an eternal charge!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Bren

 

I wonder whether it would be worthwhile trying to reflash the BIOS or clear the NVRAM.

See this thread in the Samsung forum for an example of how someone managed to resurrect their notebook.

John