Hi,
Well my GF's Acer Aspire 5720 doesn’t always connect to the router at home, so I guessed it was the wireless drivers, as my iPhone and sisters laptop always connect fine.
After an update, which didn’t solve the problem, I thought I would try a BIOS update, V1.17 to V1.42 - quite an upgrade.
Well the winFlash file opened, erased the bios, then failed on "VALIDATE FAILED" error AFTER ERASING THE BIOS FFS!
Press the power button, hard drive cycles continuously, screen doesn’t turn on, it was a brick.
After some reading I found something quite fantastic, if your laptop has a PHOENIX BIOS, you can do the following to revive it from being a brick.
1. Download the BIOS from the manufacturer’s site, preferably the version that worked originally.
2. Burn ONLY the .FD file to the CD.
3. Remove the Battery and Power Cable from the laptop.
4. Open the CD Drive with a Pin (Push a pin into the hole on the drive to force an eject)
5. Put the CD with the original .FD BIOS file into the drive.
6. Hold the FN and ESCAPE keys down.
7. Plug the MAINS LEAD ONLY into the laptop.
8. Press the power button whilst still holding the keys.
a. This will FORCE the computer to load the .FN file from the CD and write it to the BIOS of the machine.
9. The laptop will power up, you can release the keys; leave the laptop for 20-30 minutes if needed.
10. The computer will turn itself off once complete.
11. Re-insert the battery, power on the laptop.
12. It works
a. In my case – Happy GF.
I tried the version that failed the update on my laptop first, and it did not install, I downloaded the 1.19 version (closest I could find for my BIOS to 1.17 [original]) and it worked.
Hope this works for anyone that experiences this problem, thought it was a pretty awesome fix, and worth people knowing.
Read also that you can do this with desktop PC’s if you hold CTRL and Escape when pressing the power button, but don’t want to create the problem just to fix it.
Regards,
Psy