Acer Aspire 9300 - bad flash

[seedy]

Hi, I hope this is the correct place to post this, apologies if not.

I have an Acer Aspire 9300 which has suffered a bad BIOS flash. The laptop had v.1.14 BIOS (Vista) and the European Acer web site indicated there was an update available - v.1.20.
I downloaded and ran the update and the process was totally automated. Unfortunately, when the laptop rebooted, it would not POST, nor show any BIOS info. There was simply a flashing underscore '_'

Where do I go from here please? I can get hold of a USB floppy drive if necessary.

The BIOS I attempted to update to (v.1.20) is available here (http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/not..._9300.html), as is the original version (v.1.4) - strangely none are any longer being shown as available for Vista.
Thank you

[1234s282]

Google for "Phoenix Crisis Recovery Disk"

Place PHLASH16.EXE and the .wph and .rom files onto the Crisis Disk and follow the included instructions

Really sorry but i cant work out where i found a link to the recovery disk!

Il keep looking for it though!

Regards
Admin

[seedy]

Google for "Phoenix Crisis Recovery Disk"

Place PHLASH16.EXE and the .wph and .rom files onto the Crisis Disk and follow the included instructions

Really sorry but i cant work out where i found a link to the recovery disk!

Il keep looking for it though!

Regards
Admin

There is one here, listed under Method 2, presumably this would do?
Thank you

[1234s282]

Got to be worth a try

Admin

[seedy]

Cool, well I'm borrowing a USB Floppy drive on Thursday so I'll let you know how it goes.

A couple of questions:

• Does it matter which 'PHLASH16.EXE' I use? I'm tempted to try v.1.7(or v.1.9) from the Acer web site since v.1.4 was the original which I wanted to upgrade anyway and v.1.20 was what caused the current BIOS/bad flash issue.
  
• Also, if the process fails, presumably retying again will cause no further issues? ie: I don't suppose it can get any worse than a bad BIOS flash (lol).
  

Thanks

[1234s282]

the version of PHLASH shouldnt really matter and if you can get a video output to allow you to reflash then your lucky

Admin

[banana19]

Cool, well I'm borrowing a USB Floppy drive on Thursday so I'll let you know how it goes.

A couple of questions:

• Does it matter which 'PHLASH16.EXE' I use? I'm tempted to try v.1.7(or v.1.9) from the Acer web site since v.1.4 was the original which I wanted to upgrade anyway and v.1.20 was what caused the current BIOS/bad flash issue.
  
• Also, if the process fails, presumably retying again will cause no further issues? ie: I don't suppose it can get any worse than a bad BIOS flash (lol).
  

Thanks

in theory it would not matter which version. but it would be best to use the one from the acer web site if they provide one.

Nick

---

Cool, well I'm borrowing a USB Floppy drive on Thursday so I'll let you know how it goes.

A couple of questions:

• Does it matter which 'PHLASH16.EXE' I use? I'm tempted to try v.1.7(or v.1.9) from the Acer web site since v.1.4 was the original which I wanted to upgrade anyway and v.1.20 was what caused the current BIOS/bad flash issue.
  
• Also, if the process fails, presumably retying again will cause no further issues? ie: I don't suppose it can get any worse than a bad BIOS flash (lol).
  

Thanks

in theory it would not matter which version. but it would be best to use the one from the acer web site if they provide one.

Nick

Overall steps:

o. use phoenix crisis recovery tool to create a boot disk
o. replace the bios.wph with the oldest bios version (mam110.wph)
. This floppy now have mini dos, phlash16.exe, and bios.wph
o. fn+esc to load the bios file, you will hear the floppy reading the file (~ 2 mins) a silence period (~3 min).
o. if successfully, the laptop reboot, you will see the bios screen.

At this point, you would want to upgrade the laptop to appropriate bios version

o. create a bootable CD ROM that would boot into the appropriate OS, load cd rom driver, and assign appropriate drive. This is important for the next step.

o. create a cd rom that contains all bios version into folder. For example, i have v114, v117, v119. The reason is that i suspect each version use the appropriate phlash16.exe base on the time the bios is created.

Note: if you can setup the bootable CD that would also contains the above folders, that would be better, as you don't have to reject the bootable cd and insert the bios cd.

o. after you have the above create, you should know what need to be done from this point on. Basically the steps involve around boot up, navigate/select the appropriate bios, run the appropriate phlash16.exe (I manually run one of the below, one at a time.)
phlash16 /x /mode=3 /BBL mam114.wph
phlash16 /x /mode=3 /BBL mam117.wph
phlash16 /x /mode=3 /BBL mam119.wph



1. have the phoenix crisis recovery tool.
2. have the bootable cdrom with all the bios version in appropriate folder
3. know that the fn + esc would force the machine to read/load
bios in special recovery mode. Note, this is also a blind mode as you can not see anything
4. remove the HD so it's not part in the boot order
5. I don't have autoexec.bat for the intitial recovery with the fn + esc and the bios load just fine. I believe the process look for phlash16.exe and the file bios.wph

Tools used
o. usb floppy drive
o. [censored] driver to remove HD

[seedy]

Well it turned out in the end that I didnt need to reflash. I found out from another user who had the same problem that the latest 'official' bios release doesnt support 4gb of RAM (!), so simply removing 2GB fixed the problem and the system booted. I then just flashed back to v.1.4 and resinstalled the 2gb.

So, my next question is, could anyone edit the v.1.20 bios so that it supports 4gb of RAM please? Is this possible?

Thank you everyone for your help.

[seedy]

Anyone still around?

[MrTangoWhisky]

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