Hey, I bricked my board recently.
1234s282, did you make any progress with that 7pin SPI header?
I'll gladly take pictures or even ship my board if you can lend a hand.
not that it matters anymore, but I have one of these and successfully flashed the R03-A4 Acer bios. (using the guide on this website and a flash drive =)
I did notice during this process that the 1st block was protected and not rewritten(this may be normal)
Also, my machine has a wierd quirck: when put RAM in DIMM 1 and 2 I get this POST message "Enter CTRL-P to enter Intel Me". this turns out to be Intel Management Engine, which is some kind of assett tracking and config tool for Enterprise IT. When i leave DIMM 1 and 2 empty, the POST message is absent??
and the acer bios flash guide states "please remove memory from DIMM1 and DIMM2 and place in slots DIMM3 and DIMM4 before BIOS FLASH.", which may be one reason folks are bricking their boards during BIOS upgrade. the DIMM slot usage and this Intel Me may have something to do with preventing BIOS flash.
...anyway just some observations on an obsolete thread....
LMAO ...
just tried the modded bios above and... my board is toast as well.
we could build a wall with all these bricks
some interesting items...
my motherboard, acer has 2 stickers with part numbers between pocessor and dimm1 "M/B MBV340900170601247EK01" (assume acer serial or part number) and "04EG70603011 PC965M03A1-Q-8Ks2H" (assume manufacturer part number)
this has the pheonix bios sticker covering an empty/unused PLCC pinout. (mentioned above before)
there is a 2-wire (Bk+Rd) front panel-like switch inside, with a label "Recovery Switch". this is not plugged into anything at all on the mainboard, and the switch side is just tucked in with the rest of the front panel/USB wires inside the case.
I have found what I think is the BIOS chip(near the aux sys fan pwr pin) and has an adjacent CMOS clear jumper.
nearest to the CMOS clear is a 2-pin header labelled OBR
Also nearby, directly below DIMM3, but still close to the BIOS items is a 2-pin header labelled INTR1.
Perhaps some combination of attaching the 'recovery' swith to one of the headers will activate boot block on bios or allow floppy reflash?