Tuesday 6 March 2012

Update Acer Aspire Bios

The readme file for the Acer Aspire BIOS update requires that FLASHIT.EXE and the BIOS file are copied to a dos-bootable disk.

Well... the Acer Aspire netbook does not have a floppy drive, and who these days can conveniently get a boot image working off USB? I can, but it's too much hassle (it involves loading a file system image as a ramdisk, blah blah boring boring).

But I find that there is a secret BIOS mode that let's the netbook flash it's own BIOS!

http://www.qrpcw.com/2009/01/acer-aspire-one-bios-recovery.html

I quote for posterity's sake:
First format an USB stick with FAT.

Download the latest BIOS, and put both FLASHIT.EXE and the BIOS file in the root directory of the stick. Rename the BIOS file to ZG5IA32.FD, that's important. Do not remove the USB stick.

Turn the AA1 off, make sure both battery and AC adapter are connected. Press Fn+Esc, keep it pressed and press the power button to turn the AA1 on. Release Fn+Esc after a few seconds, the power button will be blinking. Press the power button once. The AA1 will now initiate the BIOS flash, do not interrupt it under any circumstances. After a while the power button will stop blinking, and the AA1 will reboot shortly after. Wait patiently.

The BIOS has been flashed and all settings reset to default.

If for some reason you made a mistake during the procedure and it doesn't reboot by itself wait 5 minutes before turning it off, just to be safe that it isn't still flashing the BIOS.
Also, thanks to http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/acer-aspire-one-bios-recovery.html

No comments:

Post a Comment