ZG5 BIOS flash failed

spleenharvester · 17 Jul 2011 at 11:49

The external monitor on my ZG5 wasn't working, tried updating the BIOS and it hung halfway through, now it boots with fans going full whack doing nothing.

Tried the usual process, ZG5IA32.fd and FLASH IT.exe on a stick, it just sits there flashing at me. Any ideas?

Cheers

hellarda · 17 Jul 2011 at 11:56

unless its got dual bios... pretty sure the mobo is now screwed? not 100% someone can back me up/say i'm wrong.

Unless you wanna buy a new bios chip and a soldering iron...

spleenharvester · 17 Jul 2011 at 12:20

hellarda said:
unless its got dual bios... pretty sure the mobo is now screwed? not 100% someone can back me up/say i'm wrong.

Unless you wanna buy a new bios chip and a soldering iron...

Nah, there should be some way to get it working. They have this crisis disk thing that should flash it, but for a lot of people it's a pain in the arse to get it working. Mine just sits there flashing at me.

Surveyor · 17 Jul 2011 at 12:43

Have you tried this?

How fix your Acer Aspire One ZG5

spleenharvester · 17 Jul 2011 at 12:54

Surveyor said:
Have you tried this?

How fix your Acer Aspire One ZG5

Indeed, that's crisis disk

It's never worked on this machine in my experience, when it was working I tried flashing through it and it never worked, gave up and used Winflash. Which obviously I can't do here.

Might just have a crack at a new BIOS chip, they don't look that hard to resolder.

spleenharvester · 18 Jul 2011 at 01:37

Ended up getting a new chip, nothing was working.

However, turns out my 40w iron is more powerful than originally expected, i.e it melted its tip, this was shortly after it melted the tracks off of the board :rolleyes:

Have removed the old chip, but 2 pads are damaged. One pad was a data connection that I managed to solder straight to a small contact point the track led to, the other is a VDDC point and god knows where that goes, the track goes into the multilayering of the PCB.

tl;dr anyone know what resistor I'd be needing to adapt the 5v USB source to the 3.3v required by the BIOS chip? Or is there a 2.7v~3.6v power source on the board somewhere I can use? I have no multimeter to hand.

Tempted to make a worklog thingie

Cheers

spleenharvester · 8 Aug 2011 at 11:46

Come on, I must be doing something wrong here?

Got another board for cheaps that died under normal use with the black screen of death issue, figured I might be able to revive that. Exact same problem, not reading any of the flash drives I have :confused: