StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I seem to have fucking killed my laptop, An Acer Aspire 1640z I reformatted it yesterday and then after trying to upgrade its drivers again (it was still blue screening) I attempted to upgrade its BIOS (really bad move apparently) and despite being a page specially dedicated to my model it allowed me to download something that has killed my computer.

On start up; I know get sequence of loud beeps. Followed by nothing: everything lits up and wirs but the screen stays completely dead.

Anyone know of a fix for this colossal blunder of mine?

(posting from my sis's laptop before anyone asks the obvious)

Send it to the manufacturer. There aren't many other ways to fix something like this.

Yeah, sadly the computer is three years old and out of warranty and they won't touch it.

Crazedwraith wrote:Yeah, sadly the computer is three years old and out of warranty and they won't touch it.

Well, there aren't many safe ways to fix a computer with a messed up bios, unfortunately. Barring going to Ebay to see if anyone is selling a motherboard that works with your laptop.

Well my plan is now to hit the local computer repairer to get a quote on them fixing it for me. Might end being a toss up between that and getting myself a new laptop.

Which definitely, will not be made by Acer.

You should get out the HDD first before you do anything, put it into a USB enclosure, connect it to another computer and back up your data.

Had I the the slightest idea how to that I might. Sadly I don't and I'm rather disinclined to dismantle my laptop to get to the hard drive; with my present luck with it, I'd just make things worse for myself.

Luckily the only really important documents I had on there was my uni work and I copied that to a usb stick before a reformatting. Even if my hard drive gets wiped all I'll lose is a few bad attempts at original fiction and fanfiction.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Send it to the manufacturer. There aren't many other ways to fix something like this.

Well, if the BIOS chip (flash ROM) is socketed, it is reasonably easy to remove it and reprogram with the correct BIOS code. Of course getting to the chip requires some work as well, especially if one does not have a repair manual at hand. The local computer repair shop should have the equipment for that in any case. Alas, most modern laptops seem to have the BIOS flash chip surface mounted on the motherboard, which means removing it requires non-trivial soldering skills and would probably cost a lot if done buy a repair shop. So there is some hope, but not much.

Just one addition: have you checked that Acer does not have any kind of BIOS recovery procedure listed at their website? Some BIOS have a separate boot block code, which is not overwritten by a regular BIOS upgrade. It may contain code that it able to boot to MS-DOS from a USB floppy disk drive or in some cases even from a CD-ROM or USB stick and run a BIOS flashing utility. I know it's a long shot and most modern laptops unfortunately no longer have that boot block code, since it was originally designed to boot from a real floppy disk drive (as in connected to a floppy disk controller, which no laptop no longer has) and instead of upgrading it to a more modern boot device they just removed it.

A bit of Googling found this: http://www.wimsbios.com/forum/topic10288.html

Hope it helps. If you're uncomfortable doing it yourself (plus you need an external floppy drive), I'm sure the repair shop will gladly do it for you... for the appropriate fee.

Thanks Nekto, that site didn't actualy work for me but it did me point in the right direction to format a floppy disk that did work.

Apparently my computer works off a 'Phoenix BIOS' for which there is a tool online to format floppy disks to flash a new BIOS on directly. Find the right bios; format a disc and hey presto functioning computer.

So thanks to Nekto and thanks to my sister (who provided the USB floppy drive) and no thanks at all to Acer support who had unhelpful bastards. They recommended I sent it to their centre for a 'chargable repair' which starts off with a £52 charge to get to them, get it to look at them and get it back before we even get into repair costs. Wankers.

Glad I could help. 52 GBP just the transport and diagnostics is insane, although not surprising for an licensed repair shop - they tend to be warranty repair only in practice, so their official prices reflect that (similar to any other business that lives off insurance, in some form, payments). You could have probably gotten a more realistic price out of a generalist computer repair shop (I'm guessing 20-40 GBP for the diagnostic and repair). Thankfully, you won't need that.

Make sure you clear the CMOS (or reset to defaults in the bios menu) after flashing the BIOS. I've had motherboards refuse to boot because I've updated the bios but forgot to clear the old bios settings from the bios' non-volatile storage.

Crazedwraith wrote:and no thanks at all to Acer support who had unhelpful bastards. They recommended I sent it to their centre for a 'chargable repair' which starts off with a £52 charge to get to them, get it to look at them and get it back before we even get into repair costs. Wankers.

So you break your laptop - then get upset when the manufacturer dares to want to charge for repairs to an out of warranty item...

Having had Acer products in the past, they are definitely one manufacturer I stay away from at all possible.

atg wrote:

Crazedwraith wrote: So you break your laptop - then get upset when the manufacturer dares to want to charge for repairs to an out of warranty item...

Pah. I may not being entirely rational, yes? But still when there's a method to fix my problem that they must know about that doesn't involve me spending a lot of money; it seems silly that they couldn't just have that information on their support site in the first place.

Plus; their chargeable repair scheme seemed set up not to help but just to extract as much money from me as possible.