BIOS corrupted? How to proceed? Acer Travelmate 290

BIOS corrupted? How to proceed? Acer Travelmate 290

I have a older ACER Travelmate 290 (manufactured in 2002 or 2003), which I recently tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10. After doing the upgrade process it appeared as if I had a problem with my x server configuration, as on the first reboot post-install I heard the Ubuntu startup sound, but had a black screen. I thought I would then reboot again to drop down into text-mode to trouble shoot the x configuration problem.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 245

Total answers/comments: 4

Comments display order:

Guest [Entry]

"This isn't necessarily a BIOS issue. The first few things to check are

1) Hook up an external display. If you can get anything on that you have a video card/LCD issue. (You may have to use an Fn key combo to get the external display up. check your manual)

2) Swap some RAM around. Bad RAM can cause a machine to not POST.

3) Remove the HDD. Usually a machine will still boot with a bad HDD and just throw an error, but on occasion I've seen yanking the hard drive fix the issue.

4) Remove any extra add-in cards. You said you've taken it apart, so if you really want you can try and POST it outside of the chassis with the WLAN card removed. Just be very careful of where you're touching. An improperly grounded chassis can cause it to not POST as well.

Most likely you are not looking at BIOS corruption unless this happened directly after a BIOS flash. What it happening is your computer is failing to POST (Power On Self Test)."

Guest [Entry]

"Had the same problem a few days ago.

To restore the notebook CMOS, remove the second RAM module (if installed) and look for a small broken conductor strip labeled JP1 on the motherboard. Make sure the battery is removed, and short the jumper JP1 with a screw driver for about two seconds. That fixed my TM290. This is the way to clear the BIOS passwords as well."

Guest [Entry]

Creating a windows live CD (For example: BartPE ) could be created to boot the machine from CDROM - Provided memory corruption is not an issue, this would help recover data and also eliminate some of the suspected hardware failures.

Guest [Entry]

"I have the same problem with my friend pc.

The only way I got it working with was by selecting boot with kernel image 2.6.28-15.
All later kernel images will give the black screen problem as described."