How to fix the Alt F10????

TheSouthernGent

A friend gave me this Acer 5520 but he forgot the password. So I read pres Alt F10 at the same time as the Acer logo appears and when I do holding both down for up to 4 or 5 minutes nothing happens except when I release them and the system boots up again asking of ra password that can't be found.

any sugestions??

 

Southern

Cory-Acer

It sounds like there might be a BIOS level password on the machine. It's black with old early 90's style box and text asking for a password. Is that what you're seeing?

 

So if it is a BIOS password, ALT-F10 won't get you past this. The system has to POST (power on self test), this is where you usually hear a beep. Also you're usually looking at the first screen that either says Acer or has a bunch of text on a black screen. This is where the BIOS has loaded, you're tapping ALT-F10 and it should start the recovery partition (if it's available) before Windows files start to try and load. So you'd have to get past that BIOS password screen before reloading the operating system is possible with the ALT-F10 method.

 

Hope this helps,
Cory

TheSouthernGent

Thanks for the reply.

Have been busy elsewhere til now.

I tried what you said but no luck also no passwords were in the bio's

But still didn't to the recover or reset the system to original state.

I took the HD and slipped it in a blavk box hooked up the the USB where I saw there is the Acer second partition.

So if I burn a CD/DVD with that info can I reinstall the system from there or what or how since I can't get the thing to go to that partition while it is in the laptop??

 

Southern

Cory-Acer

Unfortunately, burning that partition to CD/DVD won't work because it needs an application to start it.

 

If this isn't a BIOS level PW then I have to assume it's Windows. As long as you're able to access the BIOS, then recovery media should be able to reload the system. You can find them on our store at http://store.acer.com

 

Cory