I've been trying to rescue an Acer Aspire 3810tz that got wrecked by a bad (Insyde) bios update several months ago. I can get into bios screen, it'll try to load windows, but will restart before it gets all the way. It won't run Mini XP from Hirens, but it will run Mini Win98 from Hirens. When I try flashing from DOS it spits out "Error: FADT not found!" I can't find much on this error, it appears to have something to do with ACPI. I haven't found a way past that. If I try the Acer emergency bios recovery trick (FN+ESC) it'll just kick out to a Dos prompt C: Anyone have any ideas on how to turn this brick back into a computer?
I've tried flashing from a DOS formated USB, and also using the emergency method, putting the BIOS file on a FAT formated USB and booting while holding FN+ESC. The error in the bios seems to have borked it just enough to screw it up slightly. Since it won't run Win7 or XP, but will run Win98, and DOS... it's not running NT systems?
If it's a system you've replaced and it's not that important, and if you can't seem to fix it no matter what you do then maybe try linux on it? I'd suggest Mint LXDE since it doesn't take much to run it and it'd look a lot nicer than Windows 98. When flashing via the recovery method (FN+ESC) are you sure that your files named correct? That's very important so if you're not sure maybe you could just place the file onto the USB with different names and of course try different USB ports. And apparently systems normally beep while they're searching for the file, or maybe an LED will flash on some so if you get neither then maybe the key combination is different for your system
I'm actually not sure how to find out what the correct bios file name should be, so I tried 6 or 7 different ones. None worked, all kicked out to a dos prompt instead of flashing.
just sharing, i faced this situation too. had to load the bios in the phoenix tool to find out the recovery name, which was JM31X64.fd. copied it to a fat formatted usb drive. battery removed, ac and usb drive plugged in. pressed power+esc+fn the screen should be blank, eco led and hdd led lights up. when flashing is done, the system will automatically reboot. tadaa! hopefully this helps!