Good morning everyone. I am having a bad time trying to fix my laptop Acer Aspire E1-570. I have a black screen of death, when I press the power button the fans start spinning for a second and then stop. The HDD LED start to blink (when the pc worked this LED didn't blink, it was always steady).
As a note: I removed the HDD to avoid any possible data loss, since I think that the problem is related to the BIOS ( I checked before that a laptop can start even without the hard disk, obviously it won't go beyond the BIOS screen).
What I have done so far:
Removed battery pack, unplugged AC. Make the capacitors discharge by pressing the power button for 20 seconds. Reconnected everything. Still dead.
Read the manual of the PC, too trivial and target to beginner user. Under the section " BIOS " it provides only little or useless informations, like " be sure thata the laptop is connected to AC " or " connect to an external monitor". Done but still dead.
Read on a guide that sometimes these problems are related to an error in the BIOS, in particular is needed a procedure called " clear CMOS" which discharge and reset the BIOS memory. From what I have understood this can be achieved removing the little battery from the mother board or doing a so called " jumper clear" using a wire to connect two particular pins. I didn't find the pins but it must be said that I'd better leave the disassemble of the laptop as my last chance, so even here still dead.
I understood, mostly from this guide (but I read thousands), that I could have performed a reset of the BIOS from a USB stick. I searched the web and I found the bios files from the acer site. With further readings I understood that for a boot from USB I would have needed some sort of file with the extension '.bin', '.rom' and the most talked about in the forums '.fd' . With a great disappointment I found that Acer only releases executable BIOSes from his site, so no rom, fd or bin files. The BIOS was (and actually is) shipped with an embarassing readme.txt saying "run in windows". =/ If I run it displays an error message saying that the architecture is wrong (that's obvious since I was running it on my other HP laptop), and it closes itself. still dead!.
I finally figured out that it was a fake executable, indeed I was able to extract it as an archive. While unzipping, crossed my fingers, looked at the generated files and found sadly only some .sys and .dll files along with another executable called InsyderFlash.exe which opened the same program when run. Tryed to unzip even that executable, found a bunch of files called .text, .srsc and .data. I was unable to find anything useful to do with them. Don't remember where, I found a user facing the same problem I have that solved putting the exctracted files on the USB and booting from it pressing, as always Fn+Esc at startup. No need to say it didn't work for me. 3:00 in the morning and still dead.
Finally an idea: before exiting (due to wrong architecture error) the program was doing something, like detecting my current BIOS and other stuff. It was a sort of intuition. I went into my C:\User*name*.AppData\Local\Temp*folder with the name of the downloaded BIOS* and magically found a new temporary file named isflash.bin. Like a Holy Grail I copied it into the USB stick and tried to boot from it. Well something strange happened. Starting with Fn+Esc the screen lighted up! Then a string message appeared " no bootable device. Need restart" but it was ok since I hadn't connected my hard disk. I then connected my bootable USB with linux Mint, restarted the computer and....... Nothing. Tried to re-do the procedure with the USB stick but no message, no ACER logo, nothing.... still dead
As my last idea I found (don't remember where, it was 4 a.m. and I browsed thousands of web pages) a strange mystical converter called extractor (v_0.2) from .bin to .fd files. The fact is that I am not able to find the download source because I download it as a 8KB file, which runs only from the command line and has no readme or description. Fact is that I ran the command: > extractor.exe isflash.bin and it worked! It created a file .fd, which I renamed with the name of the BIOS. Now I put the file on the USB (formatted as FAT32 as always), plugged into the laptop, started with Fn+Esc held down and.... The computer emitted three long and loud beeep, then it shut down. And every time I try the same happens. **still dead??*
Now I ran out of any idea. I could send it to the costumer assistance, but I would like to know if something else still can be done. I am very curious. I know that here on Stack Exchange you are professionists, so, even if I am a noob, I tried to be the more accurate as possible and I tried to do everything before posting here the question.
Feel free to ask any detail. Bye and thank you very much for the help.
