Acer aspire one model ZG5 does not boot

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After a normal restart yesterday, my Aspire One booted into just a black screen. No POST, no BIOS, no hard drive light activity, just the power button LED on and the fan running fast. I was not very happy…

I went to the Acer Aspire One User Forum and started looking thru the Hardware section. I found this thread Dead aspire one and it looked like many others had a similar experience. After reading many stories of warranty repair or replacement, I was just about to dig up my receipts when I found this post: Re: Dead aspire one.

It seems that a lot of people had success reflashing the BIOS from a USB drive using tools provided by Acer. I don’t know if it’s officially supported by Acer or if it will void your warranty, but if the computer’s a paperweight now anyway, what the hell?

It’s very easy to do, but the steps are a bit unclear so here’s my attempt to make the whole thing painless. This worked for me, but it might not for you, so do this at your own risk.

You need:
A working USB thumbdrive you can erase. I used an old 64meg.
UNetbootin. Download from here: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
The files to flash the BIOS. I used the most recent version from here: http://sites.google.com/site/maclesblogspotcom/

Download all the files to an easy to find location.

Steps to prepare the USB drive:
Format the USB drive using the FAT file system, not FAT32.
Start UNetbootin and choose FreeDOS as the distribution. Screenshot here.
Unzip the BIOS files and copy them to the USB drive
Make a copy of the BIOS file and rename it as ZG5IA32.FD (this appears to be very important - my reflash failed until I did the copy & rename)

Reflash the BIOS:
Make sure the AAO is turned off, the battery is attached and the power adaptor is plugged in.
Insert the USB drive
Press and hold FN + ESC and press the power button to turn it on. Release the Fn & ESC keys. The LED in the power button will flash.
Press the power button again once and wait. Mine took ~3 minutes, but I’d advise that you let it sit there for at least 5 minutes just in case your’s takes longer.

When the reflashing is done, the AAO will reboot and, hopefully, you’ll be back to normal.

If it doesn’t work, try reflashing again. The keypress sequence is a little tricky.

If the second try doesn’t work, then you’ll probably have to send it off for repair.

Good luck!!!


http://chromick.com/eric/aa1/aspire-one-black-screen-of-death/

Hi guys this is the proper wat to do it there is no other way and you must follow it to the letter
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\015\012When my Aspire One powers on, the screen remains blank. How can I fix this?
\015\012\015\012Updating the BIOS will require a USB flash drive to store the BIOS information on during the update. To perform the update to the BIOS:
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1. Go here and download the latest BIOS for the netbook.
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2. Extract the files from the downloaded zipped BIOS file.
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3. In the Dos_Flash folder, rename the BIOS file from 3310.fd to ZG5IA32.FD, in all capital letters.
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4. Copy ZG5IA32.FD and Flashit.exe to the USB flash drive
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5. Ensure that the AC adapter is plugged in.
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6. Insert the USB flash drive into a USB port.
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7. Press and Hold down the Fn and the Esc keys together and press the power button.
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8. When the unit's power light comes on wait a few seconds and release the Fn and Esc keys.
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9. After the keys have been released the power light will start to blink.
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10. During the BIOS update process the display will be blank.
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11. Let the unit run and after approximately 1 to 7 minutes, the unit should reboot and the BIOS will be updated.

\015\012If the unit fails to reboot, or the BIOS was not updated sucessfully, try the steps again. If the unit continues to fail to reboot, the unit may need service.
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\015\012good luck and you will need this link for the bios and apps for makin a boot usb
\015\012http://macles.blogspot.com/2009/04/acer-aspire-one-bios-3310.html