I downloaded the BIOS file for my acer aspire 5580 model from Accer's website. (It contains several dlls, WinPhlash.exe and ZR1_3508.wph files among other files. (There is No *.fd or *.rom file) Having failed to do recovery from thumb drive, (It didn't work for me. When I press Fn+Esc and plug in the AC jack nothing happens (the power led don't blink). If I press the power button anyway, still nothing happen (it don't attempt to read from thumb drive) but the fans and lights turn on. Of course, there is no display (both external and internal)) So, I moved forward and soldered out the BIOS ROM chip to program it with hardware programmer. But the ROM file is little larger than chip size (1028 Vs 1024 KB). So, how to extract only the relevant section from the ZR1_3508.wph?
It's not an anwser but can you put it back an re-try the recovery procedure? Maybe you have skip something important. For example the keys can als be FN-R, FN-B. Also you need a Crisis Recovery Disk. It's not enough to make a bootable disk. It's need a special loader or something. I have tried it with a bootable and autoexec.bat? Try the recovery again. Make a proper Crisis Recovery Disk and hold FN-R, FN-B, or FN-ESC when you turn on the power. Of course this can only work with a Phoenix bios.
make backup.bin with programmer then compare begining and end to wph with hexeditor. yes .wph = crisdisk needed
OK, I put it back but fn-r / fn-b don't work either. I tried several other random combinations, but none worked. I just formatted the thumb drive and copied the files. I didn't use crisis recovery disk: but that can't only be the problem; it has to blink the power led when I insert the ac plug while holding fn-esc (or fn-b etc) and it has to at least try to read the thumb drive (the led in the thumb drive don't blink =no attempt at reading). I will try with crisis method tomorrow anyway. Do you know of Good link about that method?
Bump please. By bios is erased and I want to recover. But the usual recovery method somehow don't work with me. And the manufacturer won't give me the core .ROM file that is exact fit for the chip size, so that I could directly burn the chip with hardware programmer. The downloaded .wph file is few bytes larger than chip size (some say its because of additional platform data) and no one seems to know how to strip out the platform data from the file. I am screwed.
You're not yet screwed. Since you have nothing to lose, why not just chop off the data at the end of the file? Keep whatever is within the normal binary size of the chip (512KB, 1024KB, 2048KB, etc) and discard the rest. If that fails, start again, but from the end.