mswaine

I've just tried this with the nVidea chipset drivers on an ACER ASPIRE 5050 notebook after experiencing the same problems. Because there were ‘warranty is void' stickers stopping me from cracking open the notebook I had to make a guess at the chipset manufacturer and which drivers I required - and chose nVidea's 64Bit MY BIOS IS NOW CORRUPT During the install windows informed me 'these driver are wrong for your hardware' or something to that effect and the installation was halted. OK, fair enough windows, the drivers are wrong, thanks for telling me, I'll try something else, ATI is the next best bet. After a reboot though, nothing zilch. I can't even flash the BIOS because 1) blank screen (also tested with another monitor off aux VGA port) 2) wont boot off CD / DVD / USB Floppy I've built a legacy DOS boot disk with the Acer flash bios program (phlash16) also on the disk. Inside the autoexec.bat it says something to the effect of beep (I have no visual confirmation so i.e. echo ^G is the only way I know if the disk has booted) run phlash16.exe with the correct parameters pointing to the file supplied by ACER for this BIOS beep again to let me know the bios phlashing program returned but theres not a lot of beeping going on sadly, so I assume theres not a lot of booting going on either... I've also tried the 'emergency BIOS restore' method with a USB floppy as detailed in this article - no luck. Wim's BIOS Page n.b. I've since cracked the machine open, removed the watch battery and let it sit there for 10 hours hoping that by some miracle the BIOS configuration was kept alive by the watch battery. I didnt realize it was possible to do so much damage with an installation of an OS. The machine has been sent back to Acer dealer - no doubt they'll want to charge me for a new motherboard. Nightmare... !!!