Nightmare - Acer Aspire One (AAO) Not Booting / No POST

Shocked / Screwed / ***k, what the ****, why .. why,,,, mar gaya, oh sh~t

That was the expression for me Thursday night. I had to travel to Suryavilas, in the Hills for a meeting, and my AAO (Acer Aspire One), stopped Booting, Switching on at 3AM in the morning. The machine is still under warranty but hey, I had a Train at 7:40 AM in the morning, and knowing the way Acer Handles RMA / Repair, I knew they would take 7 days to even move from their ***. So, what was the option, take my macbook along, or go without a laptop.. after all it was just for a day.. but this tech junkie, could not sleep.. a few minutes of googling around, brought me to a lot of other users making posts on similar problem faced, and then, yahoo (sorry Google), a solution found.

Turns out, this is a Bug with the Firmware, but luckily our friends at Acer, built in a recovery method, not sure if this is legal / legit, and it will not hamper my warranty, but it was the only solution available to me at 3:15 AM

Thanks to *macles, here is the excerpt, of what I did

1. Get a seperate Windows Laptop
2. Get a Thumb Drive (Pen Drive / Memory Stick)
3. Format the Thumbdrive (Dos / FAT Partition)
4. Downloaded the Latest Bios from Acer Taiwan
5. Downloaded UnetBootIn and installed it
6. Ran UNETBootIn with my Thumbdrive connected to seperate (working) windows laptop and made it bootable using FreeDos (see Screenshot below) / remember drive letter maybe different in your case



7. Copied the .fd file extracted (version number will change) to Thumbdrive, and renamed it to ZG5IA32.FD
8. Copied Flashkit.exe (extracted from downloaded bios) to the Thumbdrive
9. Ejected and Inserted the Thumbdrive into Powered off Acer Aspire One
10. Connected Both battery and AC adapter (I had as usual, taken out the battery, tried to switch it on only with AC Adapter, then left everything disconnected for sometime)
11. Press Fn+Esc, keep it pressed and press the power button to turn the AAO on
12. When the power switch light started blinking after a few seconds, released Fn+ESC keys
13. Pressed Power Switch Again
14. Waited Patiently for 5 Minutes
15. Power Button Stopped Blinking (oh my god, yeh kya ho raha hai)
16. Machine Booted, thanked Google, my lucky stars, and Macles
17. Made Sure, I write this Blog Post on my return

AAO, you rock, but hey, if this bug hits, you.. you have the solution here.

G