Laptop won't boot 1 TB HDD (And other issue)

[JakeD89]

My set up:

Asus G75VW
Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM Processor- (6M Cache, up to 3.30 GHz)
8 GB DDR3 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M (2 GB)
1TB HDD
Was running Win 7 Ultimate, but I reimaged back to Win7 Home Premium 64-bit when I started having issue.


My issue:
My G75vw will not boot with 1TB hard drives. I have tried two different HDDs and neither one will boot (both boot on other systems). I am able to get it to boot using my 250 GB HDD. It came with a 1TB, and has booted for over 2.5 years.

My first thought was that there was something wrong with my BIOS so I downloaded the newest version and put it on a flash drive that I formatted to fat32. When I boot into the BIOS, go to the easy flash utility (that Asus has) and hit enter, it freezes there. It will not go into the flash utility and I am not able to do anything but do a hard reboot.

I thought, "Hey, maybe the CMOS battery is bad" and since the warranty is long expired I opened it up and tested the battery with a multimeter, it's still putting out 3V. So I unplugged it to reset the BIOS; all that worked as it should. I also reseated my RAM. But still having same issues. I am at a loss. I called ASUS, which was no help, they wanted me to buy the recovery disk. I talked to a guy at a local shop and he seems to think that the south bridge on my MB is bad. Anyone have any other ideas?
After reseating RAM I ran memtester86 for about 11.5 hours and attached is a picture of the result.
http/i1077.photobucket.com/albums/w468/Thor62/20150227_074129_zpscczb6h5h.jpgS

 

[Prostar Computer]

I talked to a guy at a local shop and he seems to think that the south bridge on my MB is bad.

That's possible. When you try to boot from the drives that don't seem to work, what sort of prompt/message are you receiving (if any)?

 

[JakeD89]

It doesn't give any sort of prompt. When I first power it on the asus splash screen comes up and it plays the post sound, but it will not move past that point. It will sit there and play the post sound over and over again.

 

[Prostar Computer]

If you're able to enter the BIOS setup utility, does the drive(s) that won't boot show up in your BIOS utility properly? And are they the same make + model?

 

[JakeD89]

::SOLVED::

Whether this will work every time someone has this issue or not I do not know, but what solved my issue was buying a new CMOS chip with the new BIOS flashed onto it and resolder the new chip onto the board. This has solved my issues.

 

[Prostar Computer]

Well done!

 

[JakeD89]

Thank you. Luckily I work with some guys who are extremely skilled when it comes to this sort of soldering (I don't know if I would have been able to complete this task without doing more harm than good). The guy I had help me with this actually has soldered boards in the past so it was really cool of him to help me out.