Acer 5830TG no bootable device after BSOD

dinsdale

Hi, my 5830TG (5830TG-2436G75Mnbb) bluescreened today, maybe coincidentally, during an update of the Intel chipset drivers. I had to hold the power button to turn it off but on restart no bootable devices were found. The BIOS screen showed that there were no SATA or ATAPI drives.

 

The boot drive was an almost new Samsung SSD but it made no difference when I refitted the old WD drive. I put a bootable (Memtest) disc in the optical drive and tried several times to reboot. On one occasion, with just the optical drive fitted, the laptop booted and appeared to perform normally. After shutting down and refitting either the SSD or HDD it was back to the 'no bootable device found' message.

 

On another occasion, when the WD drive was fitted, the BIOS reported that both it and the optical drive were present and I was able to boot into Windows 7 where I'd hoped to refresh the BIOS. The latest version 1.12 was already installed but I wanted to explore possible corruption before looking elsewhere. Windows froze after a couple of minutes, luckily before I started the flash process. After a hard restart neither drive was seen by the BIOS. I tried booting from the SSD and HDD via a USB interface but in both cases there was a brief bluescreen shortly after 'loading Windows' appeared.

 

The service manual for this model describes a process to create a crisis disk, a bootable USB stick with the BIOS file. The procedure calls for the combination of two files files which aren't present in any of the 5830TG BIOS releases:

 

< copy /b KBC.ROM + BIOS.FD Combine.fd> 

rename combine.fd to P4LJ0x64.fd, copy to USB stick

 

Acer BIOS updates for older models would usually include 'cridisk.exe' in the DOS folder for this purpose but the 5830TG releases have a single 'P4LJ0112.exe' for use with Windows and a DOS folder containing:

 

bios.bat, dos4gw.exe, fla**bleep**.exe, K27C112A.rom, mp.ini, P4LJ0112.bin, rccp.exe, sprom.exe    (edit: the ' fla**bleep**.exe' was originally typed as 'flash it.exe', but without the space) 

 

I found a version of 'P4LJ0x64.fd' after decompressing the Windows 'P4LJ0112.exe' and copied that to a formatted USB stick. The recovery procedure lasted a few minutes with the fan running at full speed before a single beep and reboot but it made no difference. The screen was dark throughout so I don't know if the file I'd scavenged was accepted.

 

I made a bootable USB stick and added the DOS files. The first section seemed to work normally but a second, 'updating EC', reported only 50% completion before exiting so I don't know if it completed properly. Just tried shorting the 'JCMOS1' contacts intended for clearing passwords but after spending a day on this I'll try almost anything. Is there some other way to create a rescue disk or another possible solution to the booting issue?