Asus R501V won't boot, HDD Issue

[drh94]

Hi,
Model: Asus R501v
OS: Win7 Home Premium

I got my laptop back in late 2012 and for years it worked fine.

Over the past 6 months, it has been bluescreening occasionally and has not been turning on for the past two weeks.

When the power button is pressed, of the 5 lights, a lightbulb led lights up, then the hard disk led flashes on before dying.

I followed advice off this site last week and the computer worked for about 45mins after taking out the adapter and battery and holding down the power button. This fix is no longer working.

When it shut off again, the screen froze and started jumping around before going black. There were 2 updates to install.
(out of warranty by a year)

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, drh94.

If you suspect the drive, I'd recommend that you take it out and connect it to a different computer - either externally via a SATA to USB cable, external enclosure, or a docking station, or internally via a SATA connection, to see if the drive is properly recognized and if you can backup your data.
After you've backed up your data or if you don't want to backup anything, I'd recommend that you download the manufacturer's diagnostic tool to test the HDD with it, in order to find out if there are any errors or bad sectors. This way, depending on the results, at least you'll be able to find out if the drive is causing the issues or if you should keep looking somewhere else.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD