TravelMate C110/C111TCi BIOS Recovery

AdmiralThrawn

Greetings!

 

I just flashed the latest BIOS ("R01-A1S") into my Acer TravelMate C110 / C111TCi under WinXP and it bricked the machine. Meaning you switch it on and get a nice black screen.

 

Now, I do know that this machine has a Phoenix BIOS, and that there are certain recovery methods for such BIOSes involving hooking up a USB floppy drive with a Phoenix Crisis Recovery Disk on it, including my previously backupped BIOS (!) renamed to "bios.wph" as by Phoenix instructions.

 

Also, the user needs to set the BootBlock Jumper/DIP-Switch to "Erasable". In the case of the C110, this switch can be found by removing the keyboard, it's switch #2 (the block is called "SW1" in the service guide) right next to R121/R122 in the lower right of the area that you can see after removing the keyboard.

 

Now, people are saying that you have to remove the battery and power, then press and hold either Fn+Esc, Win+Esc, Fn+B, Fn+F or W, and while doing so, plug in the AC power and switch it on.

 

After that, the recovery mode should be initialized and data should be read from the USB floppy, flashing the BIOS back in.

 

In my case, the floppy is never even being accessed, and I assume that the TravelMate C110 uses a different key combination for this or it may even have the Phoenix recovery mode NOT implemented?

 

My question is: Does the recovery mode exist on the TravelMate C110 series' Phoenix BIOS and if so, how do I activate it? Can I somehow read the necessary keycodes from the BIOS images with a hex editor from a specific position in the ROM image?

 

Setting the BootBlock switch does make the machine produce a weird beep code sequence when powered on, but the key combos don't work, no matter the position of the BootBlock switch.

 

In case anyone wants to know, the beep code is:

 

3 short - 1 short - 4 short - 3 short

 

Can anyone provide some in-depth knowledge about how to recover the BIOS of this specific machine without having to physically exchange the EEPROM chip or the entire system board?

 

Thanks a lot!

Ryanrr

I'm sorry to hear your having issues with this BIOS update, however due to the age of this machine it is no longer supported by our service team. Hopefully other member have some experience with this unit that they'll be able to share soon.

JackE

Have you tried reseating the ram module?

 

Jack E/NJ

AdmiralThrawn

Many times, yes. Also the one that is usually not accessible (i have dis- and reassembled the machine many times now, both before and after my BIOS flash'o'death). Since it died exactly after the BIOS flash, and since the crisis recovery doesn't work, it appears to be the case that the bootblock is damaged despite the write protect dip switch set. At least I can find no other explanation for this.

 

I also contacted somebody in another unofficial Acer user forum in Germany, who does BIOS recovery (flashing the chips in a hardware EEPROM flasher and then soldering the new chips onto the system boards) and he seems to agree with my assumption.

 

I now consider the machine lost. Sad, but changing the chip is unfortunately just not worth it. I'll have to look for another operating systems testing machine now it seems.

JackE

Well, I'm not yet ready to consider the machine lost until you try one more thing. First, I'm gonna assume that chip in question is OK but, due physical wear and tear, one or more solder connections have cracked, delaminated or otherwise failed on the MB. If so, a technique called solder reflow might resolve the issue. If you have access to a toaster oven with decent temperature control, you can do this. Here is the last page of a recent thread by another Acer community member who was prepared to do a MB reflow after all other technisques to resolve a BSOD issue failed.

 

http://community.acer.com/t5/Notebooks-Netbooks/Acer-5560G-BSOD/td-p/199113/page/4

 

I'm trying to find out now whether or not this particular reflow succeeded. Admittedly, it's a desperation move, but sounds like at this point, you have nothing to lose by trying it. Shake & bake if you dare. 8^)

 

Good luck

 

Jack E/NJ     

AdmiralThrawn

I remember certain nVidia GPUs where this can help (the ones that would start "floating" when very hot due to the low-quality soldering tin). Basically, you'd need to to both a reball and reflow.

 

But here? I dunno..  I'm not even sure whether the BIOS chip is actually BGA or PGA/TSOP. I have checked out and identified several of the chips on the system board, but I have not found the BIOS chip yet. But I haven't looked them all up on the web.

 

I am not sure whether I should try and put the whole system board in the oven. The machine was also perfectly stable before me flashing the BIOS (I have done stability tests, loading the CPU non-stop for several days straight after servicing the machines passive cooling setup).

 

I highly doubt it's a broken soldering spot in this case. Of course, I could still try it.. It's not like it can get any worse at this point.

JackE

You might find the chip by back-tracing from the CMOS battery. I'd guess they'd be close together.

 

Jack E/NJ

AdmiralThrawn

That's a good idea of course. But I haven't located the battery either. It doesn't seem to be one of these classic button cell batteries that you can see immediately. Maybe because it's a very small and compact machine? Could be a smaller battery.

 

But I'll re-open the machine tomorrow and check again, more thoroughly this time.

AdmiralThrawn

I just wanted to report back, I'm sorry, but I simply didn't have the time recently. There is just too much other work that needs to be done right now, and the TravelMate went down on the priority list..