Aspire V3-551 Won't boot, can't enter BIOS

A friend gave me her daughter's Aspier V3-551 to repair. When booted there is the Acer splash screen and then just a blinking cursor in the top left corner. I cannot enter BIOS with F2 even if I hold it down while powering up. No change if I remove the battery and run on AC and no response to F12. The HDD has what looks like good data on it. If I pull the battery and the HDD and power up I get the PXE boot screen that complains of no network followed by "Press any key...". Pressing F2 and many other keys causes the message to repeat (as expected), but pressing F12 causes no response at all.

I believe this is a scrambled BIOS problem, but am not sure what is the best way to recover.

If I create a bootable USB thumb drive, will I be able to get the machine to boot from that drive and not look for a PXE server?
I could disassemble the chassis and pull the CMOS battery, would that help?
Is there any other way to initialize the BIOS?

Suggestions appreciated and "Thanks!" in advance.

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-Justin

EJE,

Very strange that you would not be able to enter the BIOS. F12 is not enabled by default in the BIOS, you have to enable it; of course if you can't access the BIOS that presents a problem. You can try to clear the BIOS by way of the CMOS battery, if needed, that may allow entry.

EJE

Thanks for the comment. Didn't pull the battery, but found a great site for teardown info: http://www.insidemylaptop.com/how-to-disassemble-acer-aspire-v3-551-8469/

Spent a lot of time trying to find the right BIOS flash files, espically those containing .FD files mentioned on other sites. Used the CRITICAL Mode entry of Fn + Esc (with no battery) without a USB drive connected just to see what would happen. BIOS came back after restart! Set it to Defaults and that problem solved. BTW, this BIOS was only v1.02 which is not even mentioned on the Downloads support page - much confusion over what BIOS version applies to what machine, even with serial number entered.

Now have corrupted Windows and tried Factory Restore with Backup using Alt + F10 during boot. That failed, so I ran the full recovery process (had manually backed up user's files earlier) which seemed to work. More trouble after the 20,000,000 Windows Updates tried to installed and failed. Cleaning that up now, but at least BIOS is back (and F12 option works as desired).