Swift 1 (SF114-32) bricked after updating BIOS to 1.11

alexp0
alexp0 Member Posts: 3 New User
edited April 2020 in Swift and Spin Series
Hi Folks, 

Please DO NOT UPDATE the BIOS on your system!

I got this swift 1 and after a couple of days proceeded to upgrade the BIOS from 1.03 to 1.11. I did update all drivers, including VGA per instructions. Computer started booting into recovery mode and there was just no way to get into windows. Constant 'repair' loop. There was just no way of booting into windows anymore.

I panicked, so I decided to 'downgrade' to 1.03 by booting into a WinPE environment (Hiren's Boot CD) and firing up H2OFFT-Wx64.exe update utility with 1.03 .bin

I got the 'success' screen from the flashing, and laptop shut down. It hasn't booted up since. Nada. Lights turn on when pressing the power button and that's it. No Acer logo, nothing.
I'm stuck. 
Looking online people mentioned about a Fn+Esc combination, loading only the isflash.bin on a 'mbr'-formatted USB drive. Didn't do anything.
Tried the 'crisis disk' method (by naively renaming the .bin file to ZRI.fd - despite this system not using that extension).. Nada. 

So I'm stuck with a great laptop that is not working. 

Any advice to fix this?

THANK YOU

Answers