Caution: The following should only be performed by a trained professional; while these instructions may “revive” your dead Acer Aspire One netbook, there is a good possibility you may further damage your unit and/or void your warranty. Proceed at your own risk!
A common issue I have come across at our service depot, appears to involve early-series Acer Aspire One netbooks — specifically the AOA110/AOA150 line — which for no apparent reason will suddenly fail to boot. The unit will power on, but you will neither see nor hear any further activity from the machine, other than a solid black screen.
Up until recently, this was believed to be a motherboard failure; however, a regular visitor to my store shed some light on the situation, and as a result I have personally revived more than a few “dead” Aspire Ones. The process itself is actually fairly simple, but does require use of a USB flash drive and some (very) basic file manipulations.
If your Acer belongs to the affected series of models, and you come across this particular issue, you will want to head on over to Acer‘s website, and navigate to the Support section for your particular model. Once there, download the current BIOS update file and store it to your hard-drive.
Once you have this file, follow these steps:
- Using the built-in Windows ZIP file extractor, or a program such as WinZip or WinRAR, locate and extract the files “FLASHIT.EXE” and the update file, for example “3310.FD”. These may be contained within a folder named similarly to “Dos_Flash” within the archive.
- Copy these two files to an empty USB flash drive. Rename the update file to “zg5ia32.fd”.
- Make sure your Aspire One’s battery is installed and the unit is plugged into a power source.
- Keeping the unit powered off, plug in your USB flash drive to any available USB port.
- IMPORTANT: From this point on DO NOT INTERRUPT ANY PROCESS! Doing so may permanently disable your Aspire One.
- Press and hold the Fn+Esc keys.
- Keep holding the keys, and press the Power Button, and release the Fn+Esc keys after a few seconds.
- Your Power indicator should be blinking; at this point, press the Power button once more. This will initiate the BIOS Flash process, which may take as long as 5-10 minutes to complete. Again, do not interrupt this process!
- The indicator will stop blinking after a moment and your Aspire One should automatically reboot itself soon after.
- If all went well, you will see the Acer boot screen. Voila!
We hope this helps any fellow Aspire One owners resolve this strange and annoying issue. Newer units shipped with the updated BIOS revision should not be affected by the problem.
DISCLAIMER: The PC Patrol and its associates claim no responsibility for any consequences of the preceding instructions. This information is provided solely for informational purposes, and such procedures should be attempted only by a trained professional.
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Thanks! My AOA 150 developed this problem, and your procedure revived it.