Asus G55 Black Screen

Technology and Gaming Help and Support
#1

So there’s 50 billion threads online about asus G series laptops having black screens on start, and they all appear to originate from 50 billion different problems none of which seem to perfectly match the problem I am having. So here is what is happening to me:

I first noticed this problem a year ago, only a month or two after purchasing the laptop. I got a black screen on startup, no splash screen or bios or anything. I had an SD card in the card reader, when I removed the SD card and any other peripherals everything worked fine. At the time I assumed that the SD card was the problem. The problem has occurred occasionally since then and just recently started happening more often and more severely. The spike may be related to my battery giving out, the battery is entirely dead and I can’t use the laptop unplugged. Unplugging peripherals sometimes seems to work, however it works infrequently enough that that may just be a coincidence.

I am not entirely sure the nature of the issue has been the same every time as until now I’ve never gone through a lot of trouble shooting (before I just tried a couple times until it worked, now it takes at least an hour to work once it starts doing this). Here is what I have found from my troubleshooting:
The entire screen is off, not just the backlight (holding up a flashlight reveals nothing)
Unplugging all peripherals doesn’t necessarily fix the problem
The screen never comes on at any point in the boot
The computer fully boots and logs in with working sound, I can hear the windows start up sound
In a typical boot, my keyboard’s backlight turns on for one second, then turns back off, and then finally stays on after I have logged into windows, in a black screen boot the backlight turns on and turns off like usual but stays off
My external monitor connected via HDMI tells me there’s no signal (even after using my hotkeys to tell the computer to use the external monitor)
Opening and closing the lid does not seem to work (recommended in threads for similar problems)
Unplugging the laptop and removing the battery and then holding down the power, then plugging everything back in does not work (also recommended online)
Turning on the laptop plugged in without the battery is no help

Does anyone have any thoughts?

#2

It sounds to me a lot like a BIOS issue, on my desktop I killed the mobo by flashing and crashing, so I bought a pre-flashed CMOS chip and have no intentions of trying to flash a bios on that board ever again. The only problem is that my ethernet card won’t work. I got it to work once on linux by spoofing the MAC address, so I’m sure that this is due to the BIOS coming from the ebay seller, and not from my motherboard originally. This is not the only problem, my pc is really picky about stability, if my CPU has been overclocked for too long, it sometimes forgets the ram timing settings and won’t post until I take out the CMOS battery and wait a few minutes.

My advice is to flash a new BIOS if possible and if not, prepare some money on the side for a new laptop motherboard.

#3

Is there any hope of flashing the BIOS in its current state? It still hasn’t come out of it. This time I left it unplugged all night in case that’d do something. Today I’m leaving it unplugged with no battery for a few hours to see if that’ll do anything (I’m desperate here).

I’ve got a friend coming over tomorrow who has the same laptop and his has a still functioning battery, I’m going to test it with his battery just to eliminate that as a variable.

#4

unless you remove the CMOS battery or find a bios reset button, I doubt that leaving it unplugged will do anything for a few years at least

your friend’s battery might get it to boot though, if you say it stopped POSTing after the battery died

#5

Well it did this long before the battery died, it just seemed to get worse after the battery died. Or perhaps it correlated with taking it to Alaska a week ago, that was the first time it did this and wouldn’t turn back on within 5 attempts. However I had it on my person the entire time and don’t think I damaged it in any way. I should also mention that yesterday when this first happened I had left it asleep attached to my external monitor overnight and when I went to use it it was off and wouldn’t boot. I’ll look into reseting bios, do you think that’d help?

“For future reader if anyone gets stuck on a weekend and needs to try cmos reset. The process is to take the battery out and hold the power button for 2 -3 minute. Plug power back in after 5 minutes and power up the laptop and keep tapping the F2 key. The machine should then reboot to factory default.”

Do you think I should try this?

Edit: found this thread: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?5396-Magnetic-sensor-switch-issue-on-Asus-G53SW-XN1-when-closing-the-lid.
I’ve tried some magnets (as recommended by the thread) to no avail however a broken magnetic sensor would soooooo perfectly explain my problem that I don’t think I should give up on it yet. Maybe I’ll just keep rubbing my computer with a magnet (it’s pretty lightweight so I hope I won’t hurt anything). I do feel the magnet grabbing at something in the described area.

Edit2: Shit I believe I’ve confirmed that the magnet sensor isn’t the problem. I thought it was strange that the thread above said he couldn’t turn his laptop on at all while I could I just couldn’t get the display to work. So I closed the laptop and then used a pocket knife to hit the power switch while it was closed. It wouldn’t turn on at all as the thread had described, yet when I opened the lid a crack it’d turn on everything but the screen. Back to square one.

#6

sounds more and more like the onboard graphics chip is dead, if it’s nvidia then it’s almost certainly the GPU soldering at fault

you could try opening it and re-connecting the LVDS connector (the wire between the LCD and motherboard) but if you have no video-out on any outputs then it’s most certainly a dead GPU

#7

Well I finally got a hold of my buddy’s charger and battery and neither changed the situation. I went backpacking for a few days and came back and now my computer will boot up consistently about 1 in 3 tries but will black screen at the windows is starting logo unless I’m in safe mode. Ran chkdsk and didn’t get anywhere. I suspect I’ve fucked up my computer more by force shutting it down a million times. Not sure what to do now as I’m really frustrated bouncing back and forth between two relatively independent blackscreen issues.

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