g105

Probably too late. But, After several hours of searching forums etc. have just come across a solution to this issue. The c300 I was given had a password on the bios at boot and to get into the bios. 1. Under the keyboard on the c300 you'll find the cmos battery encased in blue plastic. To remove the start up password. I switched off the laptop removed the main power supply and battery and removed the battery lead for the battery for about 10secs. Then reversed process. This allowed me to boot from a liveCD as the hard drive I had installed was unpartitioned. I installed a version of kubuntu on the hdd and then realised I actually needed a different version. Restarted to boot from CD - but boot order was wrong(hdd first) and bios was password protected. So after another night of searching and looking through service manual(http://www.7hertz.com/download/acer%20c300%20tmc300sg.pdf) I discovered the solution.(pg 90) 2.Under the keyboard (on the motherboard) are two small dip switches. You can see them through the metal cover over the motherboard. The first(closer to screen hinge) of these is labelled "chkpw"(in the service manual - but not on the motherboard). So taking a guess that chkpw stood for check bios password. I switched this to the opposite side, restarted and just like that could access the bios and change the boot order, bios password etc etc. You could probably just do this last step over pulling the cmos battery - but I haven't tested this. Hope this helps!