Hello Everyone,
I feel the need to make a resource available to everyone that has ended up in the situation I was in,which was having bios issues with the Acer Predator G9-973 laptop.
First I want say that this laptop uses the Winbond Q25128FV chip and also will produce a rather large 16mb bios file. I ended up with a corrupt bios which wouldn't allow the laptop to boot. It would not post at all. The power button would light up solid along with the keyboard and mousepad but would power cycle every 15 seconds.
There are two methods of recovery, I'll explain my experience with both
1. Booting from a USB bios recovery file
2. Flashing your bios IC chip with a Programmer such as the CH341a using the CH341a program v 1.18 (HAS to be this version)
To prepare the USB flash drive you need a low volume flash drive. I chose a 2gb (It helps if it has a light so you can see the read/write)
Format this drive to a FAT FAT/32.
Now you'll need the need correct file to put onto the USB drive. You can find BIOS updates on the manufacturers website. From there download, open, and run the update exe file. This will create a temp folder /users/youraccount/appdata/temp/ The folder it will be in will have numbers and letter, 7.skd92. ect. Inside this folder will be one or two .bin files depending on the version of bios update. These bin files will be what you will use to recover. Drop the contents of this folder into your flash drive and modify the .bin files to a .fd file extension. (IF you want you know exactly what file your computer will look for and have a copy of your bios on hand, you can search the .bin file with a program such as UEFITool. Load the .bin, search for a unicode ".bin or .rom". Find the file, Export it then open with notepad and look for the .bin file it will specify. This will take you the exact name and file extension that the bios will look for to recover. Once the files are on the flash drive, insert the drive with the power off. Hold function button and esc button, power on and you will begin the restore.
This USB method didn't work for me as I believe my bios was too corrupted to even making it to loading anything from the USB.
For this method we will modify a stock bios update to a flashable .bin file. As mentioned above, use the website to download the bios update, run exe, find the .bin in the temp folder and then copy that off to a place you can access it (remember, once you close the bios updater program it will delete the files and folder.) Now with the stock bios update .bin file, one might think you could just flash this back onto the Winbond. Wrong. Unfortunately, this update .bin has all kinds of extras inside increases the file size too much to write to the chip. Here is where a program called InsydeImageExtractor comes into play. Find a copy of this program and extract it to the area where you're update .bin is located. Open Command Prompt in windows and use extractor.exe <name of file to copy> <name of new file>. This will now result in a .bin file without all the extra update stuff, reducing the size of the .bin file and allowing you to flash this back onto your chip. Once I had flashed the chip the laptop booted right up to windows login without a hitch.
It's unfortunate that the manufacturer makes it this hard to recover from problems like this.
I really hope this tutorial helps someone in need as I searched the internet for many hours to put the puzzle together.
Never give up!
I feel the need to make a resource available to everyone that has ended up in the situation I was in,which was having bios issues with the Acer Predator G9-973 laptop.
First I want say that this laptop uses the Winbond Q25128FV chip and also will produce a rather large 16mb bios file. I ended up with a corrupt bios which wouldn't allow the laptop to boot. It would not post at all. The power button would light up solid along with the keyboard and mousepad but would power cycle every 15 seconds.
There are two methods of recovery, I'll explain my experience with both
1. Booting from a USB bios recovery file
2. Flashing your bios IC chip with a Programmer such as the CH341a using the CH341a program v 1.18 (HAS to be this version)
To prepare the USB flash drive you need a low volume flash drive. I chose a 2gb (It helps if it has a light so you can see the read/write)
Format this drive to a FAT FAT/32.
Now you'll need the need correct file to put onto the USB drive. You can find BIOS updates on the manufacturers website. From there download, open, and run the update exe file. This will create a temp folder /users/youraccount/appdata/temp/ The folder it will be in will have numbers and letter, 7.skd92. ect. Inside this folder will be one or two .bin files depending on the version of bios update. These bin files will be what you will use to recover. Drop the contents of this folder into your flash drive and modify the .bin files to a .fd file extension. (IF you want you know exactly what file your computer will look for and have a copy of your bios on hand, you can search the .bin file with a program such as UEFITool. Load the .bin, search for a unicode ".bin or .rom". Find the file, Export it then open with notepad and look for the .bin file it will specify. This will take you the exact name and file extension that the bios will look for to recover. Once the files are on the flash drive, insert the drive with the power off. Hold function button and esc button, power on and you will begin the restore.
This USB method didn't work for me as I believe my bios was too corrupted to even making it to loading anything from the USB.
For this method we will modify a stock bios update to a flashable .bin file. As mentioned above, use the website to download the bios update, run exe, find the .bin in the temp folder and then copy that off to a place you can access it (remember, once you close the bios updater program it will delete the files and folder.) Now with the stock bios update .bin file, one might think you could just flash this back onto the Winbond. Wrong. Unfortunately, this update .bin has all kinds of extras inside increases the file size too much to write to the chip. Here is where a program called InsydeImageExtractor comes into play. Find a copy of this program and extract it to the area where you're update .bin is located. Open Command Prompt in windows and use extractor.exe <name of file to copy> <name of new file>. This will now result in a .bin file without all the extra update stuff, reducing the size of the .bin file and allowing you to flash this back onto your chip. Once I had flashed the chip the laptop booted right up to windows login without a hitch.
It's unfortunate that the manufacturer makes it this hard to recover from problems like this.
I really hope this tutorial helps someone in need as I searched the internet for many hours to put the puzzle together.
Never give up!
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