Cant enter setup - Aspire XC-603G

I have an Acer Aspire AXC-603G-UW30 that stopped booting this week after being in operation for a few months. The PC displays the Acer logo, "Press <Del> to enter setup" and stops. The Windows 8.1 boot process never starts. If I press <Del> upon boot, the message changes to "Entering Setup..." but the Acer logo stays on screen and the BIOS setup menu is not displayed.

Some community posts on other Acer products suggested clearing the CMOS in similar cases. To do this, I changed the 3-pin jumper to the other side, removed the battery, waited a few minutes, inserted the battery and then placed the 3-pin jumper back in its original position. Yet that didn't change the boot behavior.

Would anyone have other suggestions? What could prevent the PC from going into its BIOS menu? Thanks.

Accepted answers

All comments

IronFly

if you disconnect the HDD and press Del, are you able to enter BIOS?

JAlvarez

Thanks for your suggestion. Disconnected the hard drive but the boot behavior is the same.

IronFly

i think you Aspire is still under official warranty, give a call to Acer service support.

JAlvarez

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, the system is out of warranty.

I tried booting with a USB drive (prepared with FreeDOS using Rufus) to update the BIOS to the current version (P11.B2 2014/08/28). The USB drive seems to be recognized (flashes several times), but the boot menu option is not enabled by default. Is there a CMOS reset procedure for the XC-603G other than the 3-pin jumper mentioned on the link below? The XC-603G motherboard has 3 jumpers near the CMOS battery: CMOS1 (3-pin), GPIO1, GPIO2 (2-pin).

http://www.biosflash.com/e/bios-cmos-reset.htm

I have a full backup of the hard drive using Acronis True Image. Yet a restore requires being able to boot from USB or CD. Is there a way to directly boot from the partitions labelled "Recovery" or "Push Button Reset" on the hard drive?

glajeunesse

Usually moving the jumper will do it, but not knowing what that jumper really does, there's another way to clear the CMOS.

1. Remove the CMOS battery

2. Unplug the power from the computer (important, the power can keep the CMOS alive even if battery is dead - if it's a laptop, remove the laptop battery also!)

3. Leave it alone for a while... a few hours or even overnight (capacitors and such need to drain) You can sometimes speed it up by holding the power button down for a while...