Seeking help: Asus ROG Strix G17 laptop freezes or blue-screens when trying to boot

[Origon]

Been watching LTT for a while but never checked out the forum. Hoping someone here might have some useful tech tips because I'm at the end of my rope here.

 

I've had this Asus ROG Strix G17 laptop for I think a little over a year now, and it's been working fine up until a few days ago. There have been a few symptoms, and I'm not sure they're all related, but the main one is that the system very often will fail to boot.

 

Specifically, the "ROG" logo will flash on, then the Windows "spinning circle of dots" will appear underneath and spin for a second or two. But then the dots freeze still, or occasionally stutter through a few frames and then freeze. Once that happens, the computer will stay like that indefinitely (I've left it overnight as a test). A key detail is that this doesn't happen every time, just most of the time. After several tries, I have repeatedly gotten Windows to boot just fine, and after booting it seems to work without issue.

 

It's worth noting that I've never had a problem getting into the BIOS menu; that always comes up reliably, so I know it can boot that far.

Another potentially related symptom is that rarely, when restarting and restarting in an attempt to get into Windows, I will receive a Blue Screen with the stop code CLOCK WATCHDOG TIMEOUT.

 

I've tried... SO many things. I'll attempt to name the relevant actions:

• I cloned the OS disk to a brand new drive and swapped them- no improvement. This has me thinking that it's not a bad drive (technically there is a second, non-bootable drive in there as well, but I don't know why that would matter).

• I tried booting off a Windows installation USB drive to attempt repairs, and the same thing happened (it froze while trying to boot from the USB), which makes me think it's not a bad Windows install that's causing the problem either. Twice, when booted into Windows, I attempted an "in-place upgrade" (repair install), which each time failed and rolled back because of a hung reboot.

• I've reseated the RAM.

• I've run the Windows memory diagnostic tool which found no problems.

• I tried "Load Optimized Defaults" in the BIOS (even though I hadn't changed anything).

• I've tried booting without any external devices connected. Nothing plugged in at all besides the charger.

Details on specs: The BIOS version is 331, which I believe is the latest. Processor is a Ryzen 9 5900HX w/ Radeon Graphics. GPU is an RTX 3060 Laptop. It has 2 8 GB sticks of RAM for a total of 16 GB (I don't know the type, whatever came with the computer).

 

What else can I even test for or look at at this point?

[Chance42069]

Any solution? I am currently running into this issue now. Sometimes when the loading dots freeze, there is a small blue box that shows up around it. I have attached a picture to show what I mean. I am at a loss and this is on the first boot up after I built my first PC. Bummer

[AlexDR19]

Any updates on this? I have exactly the same laptop and exactly the same problem. Any help would be appreciated because I'm getting desperate, I really need the laptop to work again

[tangzero]

same issue here