Acer Aspire E1-531 black screen (BIOS ?)

[Dannyx]

Good day folks. I'd like a bit of insight on this Acer Aspire notebook that doesn't turn on: upon pressing the power button, the power light comes on and the fan spins for a while, but there's no picture. It would sometimes power-cycle, other times it just stays on doing nothing. The chap who brought it in said that it WOULD eventually come on but only after a ridiculous amount of time, like 3 hours or so, which I not only find hard to believe but also don't have

I'm not sure if it's a hardware or BIOS issue. Heating up the board evenly all around yielded no changes in the behaviour whatsoever and neither did the standard procedures like removing the HDD, RAM and whatnot, so I thought I'd dive into more "professional" repairs and perhaps try the BIOS or perhaps something else someone might suggest along the way. I have one of those USB-serial programmer thingies which I use a lot for TVs, so I can even flash it "manually" if need-be. It hasn't got a graphics chip (the area where it's supposed to go is unpopulated), so heating the board up was silly really. I'm no pro, so I'm not sure if that's the issue indeed, that's what I'm asking....cheers guys. Any help is more than welcome.

[Dannyx]

Re: Acer Aspire E1-531 black screen (BIOS ?)

Small update: following a successful unbricking procedure of a HP laptop a while ago, I thought I'd try the same method here since it was described as being identical: place the BIOS files on a flash drive, plug it in, hold FN and ESC and turn on the laptop....well the fan did come on at a higher speed this time, so that "special super-duper flashing mode" was definitely accessed, and I'm even getting activity on my flash drive every now and then, but it's been at it for around 10 minutes now and it's still not doing anything, so I fear this may not be it....either that, or it's got the wrong firmware on there, which is not official btw, I found it here and it's for a slightly different model.

[Dannyx]

Re: Acer Aspire E1-531 black screen (BIOS ?)

Laptop is now working: I flashed the bios straight onto the chip with the file provided by ridamouh159 in post #10 here so big shoutout to this chap if you're out there reading this ! BIG Thanks Cheers.