Acer BIOS update froze, bricked Aspire TC-120

Greggo

I was a fool to let the Acer hub thing finally convince me to update BIOS. It started flashing “updating” and never stopped. After 3-4 hours, I tried to quit (won’t allow), Ctr-alt-del, etc. Finally took a hard power down to get any changes, and you guessed it, no restart. I don’t get a splash screen at all but it’s powered on. Get a double beep after 2-3 minutes, which will continue like every 10ish minutes with multiple beeps - I heard 7 or more. All my other PCs are HP and when I make a USB recovery drive from those using Windows app, they won’t boot from the USB 2.0 slot on the TC-120. I downloaded the most current BIOS and placed the extracted folder on the USB drive in hopes the magical BIOS fairy would find and use it. No joy. Should I replace the .fi file on the recovery drive with the Acer? I am at a loss for what angle to attack this from. I know enough about PCs to be dangerous to myself and others…

StevenGen

Greggo said:

I haven’t been able to get BIOS to come up. I never get the Acer splash screen. Just two beeps after a few minutes then maybe nine beeps after another few then seven beeps. I found something to try with a bootable USB. I’ll report back.

You can do the following as Acer recommends for the Aspire TC-120 BIOS recovery, seeing that you bricked your system;

BIOS Recovery

When you boot up the computer and you hear one long beep, followed by a shorter one, the system BIOS is damaged. This may be caused by an interruption during a BIOS flash procedure (e.g. a power outage) or a corrupted BIOS code, which will cause the system to go into an unbootable state. You need to access and execute the boot block program to reboot the computer and recover the regular BIOS code. Note the following when restoring the BIOS settings:

• Make sure the computer is connected to a UPS unit during the BIOS recovery process.

• The BIOS recovery media should be prepared in a computer running the Windows OS. A USB flash drive can be used.

Creating the BIOS Crisis Recovery Disk

1. Set up a computer running the Windows operating system and connect the BIOS recovery media.

2. Copy the target BIOS ROM file to the BIOS recovery media and rename it as “RCVBOOT.CAP”. 3. Eject the BIOS recovery media from the computer.

Performing a BIOS Recovery

1. Shut down the system with failed BIOS.

2. Put the BIOS ROM file (it may exist at \ROM\xxx.CAP) to a USB storage.

3. Rename BIOS ROM file to RCVBOOT.CAP (i.e. P11-A0.CAP to RCVBOOT.CAP)

4. Plug the USB storage to the system.

5. Press the power button to turn on the system. The system will now execute the BIOS recovery process. You will hear a long beep followed by a short beep.

6. Select Proceed with flash update to start recovery.

7. Wait for the program to finish with the recovery.

8. Flash update completed.

9. Press any key to reboot system.

10. The BIOS recovery is now completed.

If you can't get the above to recover the BIOS then your last choice besides bying a new mobo is to replace the BIOS chip with a formatted last version P11-A4 chip BIOS which is a specialist job so don’t attempt to do it yourself, take your computer to a technician that has all the tools.