Acer Pedator Helios 500 PH517-61 Ryzen/Vega BIOS update 1.09 failure no POST
Hello everyone
My machine as you can tell is the Acer Predator Helios PH517-61 with Ryzen 2700 and Vega56 (using win 10 x64 home version with latest updates).
Last night, I downloaded the latest BIOS update for this machine (yes I picked the correct one for this machine), and ran the file to update it to latest 1.09 version.
The installation of the BIOS went on fine (there were no interruptions during the installation), but once it finished and restarted, the machine refused to POST.
It turns on of course, but there is no Acer Logo (the screen remains dark/non functional, keyboard LED lights reverted to factory default and overall just sits there doing nothing) and I CANNOT get into the bios by pressing F2 button at the very beginning.
About a few months ago I installed the 1.08 BIOS for this machine just fine (which worked - and was needed to ensure the AMD hw would work correctly with latest Wind 10 updates), but this latest update seems to have killed my machine (and, obviously I need the machine for my college work).
I discovered an option online for a potential BIOS recovery by pressing FN+ESC keys upon startup and a USB drive which has an extracted exe contents of the 1.08 BIOS onto it (chose that one because it was the last one which worked).
But, the problem is, while the blue button blinked as it was described, the USB flash stick never turned on and the BIOS didn't recover itself.
The stick is an 8GB USB flash drive formatted to FAT32 and nothing on it but the extracted 1.08 BIOS contents for this machines.
I don't have a 4GB stick, nor do I have the option in Windows to format the USB stick to FAT16, but admittedly, I had issues before with boot sticks for this laptop when I wanted to see if I can do a clean Windows install, and for some reason, the machine always refused to boot from the stick (there was no option in BIOS to set up the boot parameters from the stick itself, I think its because the stick needed to be formatted precisely to a format the UEFI bios would detect it... could that be causing the problem here?).
Are there any suggestions I can try before asking Acer for RMA?
Also, the laptop is still covered with the warranty, but I hope they won't ask money off me to repair a BIOS problem (though I think I can cover the courier expenses if they ask me to send it to them), because quite frankly, rigt now, I'm a poor student and cannot afford to fork out large sums of money.
