Flashing BIOS (Acer Aspire 2920z)
A few weeks ago my precious Acer Aspire 2920z started misbehaving.
The symptoms:
- Power and battery leds flashing as soon as I plug it in.
- Automatic power on as soon as I plug it in.
- Screen backlight doesn't go on and i can see it gets through the BIOS splash screen and then nothing.
- On battery exactly the same results, except that this time it waits for you to push the power button to start.
Suggestions:
- Unplug it and remove the battery. Then keep the power button pressed for about 1 minute to statically discharge the laptop. Didn't work.
- Your mobo is bricked. Didn't look like this.
- There is a short circuit in the display cables. Tried without the display and an external monitor. Still the same.
- Your power supply is bricked get a new one. Didn't look like this.
- There is something wrong with the power conductors. I was almost convinced that this was the problem but it was not…
- A friend told me he had a similar problem and he got it fixed flashing the BIOS. Didn't believe it at the begining but that was it.
The solution:
Flash your BIOS.
- Download the latest BIOS from http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/downloads.html and not the new site (it includes an outdated version and no DOS utility…)
- Download unetbootin.
- Create a FreeDOS usb with unetbootin
- Copy and paste everything from the zip you downloaded from Acer to the bootable usb stick you just created
- Boot your laptop from the usb stick and choose option 5 when the FreeDOS menu appears
-
Type the letter of the usb stick to enter it. In my case it was
c:
-
execute
dir
to see if you are at the right place (you should see the files you pasted)
-
execute
phlash16 /x /s /mode=3 CLD-114.WPH
to flash the BIOS (you might want to execute the batch file instead but in my case it did not work)
- That's it. My precious is working fine again.