The Acer Aspire One has a fairly common fault – power on but no display. This is caused by a bios corruption or similar. Acer have very kindly added a built in BIOS recovery routine, that makes it a doddle to fix! It works by booting into a minimum Bios environment by accessing a hidden boot block that will allow you to re-flash the Bios. This will work even if the laptop wont POST – otherwise known as crisis recovery.
All you need is 1x USB pen (formatted with the FAT filesystem).
Download this zip file and extract the FLASHIT.EXE and ZG5IA32.FD files onto the fomatted USB pen.
Please note – this USB Pen does NOT need to be bootable.
Turn your Aspire One off, and make sure both battery and AC adapter are plugged in. Plug the USB pen into the side.
Press Fn and Esc simultaneously, keep them pressed and press the power button. You may release Fn+Esc after a few seconds. The power button starts blinking at this point, press it once. The Aspire One will now access the files on the flash drive and initiate flashing the BIOS. After a while the power button stops blinking, and will reboot by itself. Don’t unplug the Aspire One or try to turn off at this point, it may take a couple of minutes.
If this dosen’t fix your Aspire One, you may have a later BIOS. Simply download the latest BIOS file from Acer’s web site, rename it to ZG5IA32.FD (it will only work with this name) and try again.