ASUS N76VZ bios failure

[Helle Thomsen]

I cloned the system to a bigger SSD, inserted it and selected the right boot disk in BIOS. After that, only black screen. No access to BIOS, when I press F2. The fan starts and the keyboard lights up briefly.
I have tried with and without battery, with and without AC power, with and without RAM, with and without hard drives, with and without external monitor, always same result.
My guess is that the BIOS settings are corrupted, so I want to reset them, but how can I do that when I cannot access the BIOS screen? Is it possible without opening the notebook and taking out the CMOS battery for a while?
I have found a disassembly video, but previous repair men have made one of the screws impossible to get out and have furhermore glued the bottom and the top together so quite a bit of violence will be needed to get it opened.

 

[RealBeast]

Did you try booting the new SSD with an install disk in the optical drive and doing a startup repair to fix the SRP? Are you attempting to boot with only one SSD attached?

 

[Helle Thomsen]

Thank you for your swift reply, RealBeast.

I have now tried to boot from repair disk in DVD drive. The drive reads a bit and then nothing happens. With a bootable USB stick nothing at all happens.
If by SRP you mean system restore point, there wasn't made one before the cloning, but I doubt it could help anything.
I have tried with both the original hd that worked perfectly just moments before as well as the cloned disk. I have tried with and without one more disk (no system, only data) mounted. Same (lack of) result.

I also managed to get the case opened and took out the CMOS battery for something like 30 seconds, but that didn't help either. I will try again and keep it out for a longer time. Apart from that, I'm out of ideas.

 

[RealBeast]

SRP = system reserved partition. It is where Windows 7 and 8 generally keep the bootmanager information now.

If you took the CMOS battery out, to reset the bios you also need to unplug the PSU from the wall.

A repair disk may be insufficient, you may need a full install disk. If you are running Windows 7 download a full install image of the same version you are running from Digital River, and burn it to a DVD and try that.

 

[Helle Thomsen]

Sorry I didn't mention it, but naturally I unplugged the AC and took out the big battery.

I don't believe it is relevant what disks I insert as the error seems to happen before it reads anything.

Is there a way to force it to show post messages or the bios setup screen?

 

[RealBeast]

Unfortunately no.

I would contact ASUS support for their recommendation.