Acer Aspire 7250-3821 BIOS Issue

First of all, I know that support does not offer assistance with BIOS passwords due to the possibility of theft. But my request is legit (how many times have you heard that).

A co-worker brought this laptop to me - purchased for use on her family farm - a cousin who was tossed off the farm for lots of less than pleasant activities apparently put a BIOS password on the laptop and killed the screen.

I can get the laptop to boot using an external monitor but am immediatly asked for a password. I have seen sites that after so many failed attempts you get a code and can do things with that code but this simply gives a system halted message.

Any chance of someone out there having any ideas?

Removing the battery for several days did not help.

Thanks in advance,

Chad

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Sharanji

You may perform the below mentioned steps at your own risk, Please only attempt this if you are comfortable opening the memory bay at the bottom of your computer. If you are not comfortable please take help of a local technician near your location.

You may clear the password by shorting the CMOS jumper, check the attached image

To clear User or Supervisor passwords, open the DIMM door and use a metal instrument to short the RTCRST# point.

sathya0403

Hi,

Try to rest RTCRST# point. in the Mainboard,. make sure that you do not short circuit any other Points,. Cheers

cceller

I am totally comfortable and have locate this jumper.

Can you describe the process a bit more?

Remove the AC power?

Remove the battery?

Do I need to pull the CMOS battery?

Remove the HD?

Then I suppose I use a paperclip or something, one end o the jumper and one on the ground of the RAM slot?

Thanks,

Chad

cceller

Oh well, I have followed some examples from Youtube and nothing works so I guess all I can do is replace the motherboard.

sathya0403

HI,

Yes you need to remove the AC adpater & the Battery, but not requred to remove the HDD or the CMOS battery, but removing the CMOS battery would be put you in a safer side, RTCRST# is just 2 Points on the MBD(Pic as attached by #Sharanji), using a Wire or just need to Connect the 2 points for 2 -4 seconds,. thats it,. Cheers

hydranix

Nobody has any idea whay they're talking about, every method mentioned is over ten years old and useless.

Since you can't boot, you're likely screwed, but there one possiblity.

First and foremost you need to gain control of boot, so you can clear the password for BIOS access. So we first need to try to remove at least the boot password.

Physically clearing CMOS probably doesn't work, as the password is saved onto the BIOS ROM itself.

Download the BIOS update for the machine. Extract the bios file from the .exe and do not change its name.

Prepare a FAT16 or FAT32 filesystem flash drive with nothing on it.

Place the BIOS file (.fd file usually) in the root of the flashdrive (only file, no directories on flashdrive)

Rempve the battery, and detach all USB devices if any, from the non-boot machine. Have the AC adaptor nearby.

Be sure the machine is powered off.

Plug the flash drive into a USB port on the machine.

With the machine powered off and without it's battery, press and hold the [Fn] + [ESC] keys. (Sometimes its the [Windows] + [B] keys but i've found the first to always work.

Do not release keys and attach the AC adaptor to the laptop.

After a few second, without releasing keys, press the power button.

It should act somewhat funny and suddenly shut down. After it does that, you can release keys. Then wait a bit, and reattach battery + other stuff and try to boot. Hopefully the first password will be cleared. The next one is easy. Do a full bios flash from DOS clearing CMOS and password region on the ROM.