Solved Acer aspire 9410 with Black screen of death

[mohavepc]

Hello all:
I have an Acer Aspire 9410-4441 with 2gb pc2 6400s sodimm ram, 160gb Hard drive, windows 7 home prem.
this all started when I tried to upgrade Ram with a 1GB PC2 6400 Sodimm in slot 2. I have been running windows 7 on 2 gb for a year with no issues. When trying to boot the power light turns on, and a light on the left of the keyboard that looks like a square above the Numlock and capslock lights comes on, The DVD drive cycles and looks for a disk to boot the everything halts. no screen just black.
I removed the 1GB stick from slot 2 and traid again to same problem.
I hooked up an external monitor to make sure the LCD, Inverter or cable didn't coincidentally crap out.
I moved the 2Gb to slot 2 Same results
I removed all ram, Hard drive, wireless card same result not even a no ram warning beep.
I believe my bios crapped out while trying to update to the extra 1 gb ram stick.
Is there a way to flash the bios without it being able to boot?
any help is appriciated.

 

[bassfisher6522]

You can try removing the cmos battery and that should reset it for you.

 

[mohavepc]

looks like a full diassembly it is then, the cmos batt is not accessable through any of the trap doors or by removing the keyboard. will try that tomarrow and will post back if I have any luck

*Edit*
I had to do a complete disassembly on this machine. one would think Acer would be a little more thoughtful with the batt. access. After slicing a finger on a spring tab under the keyboard and having to fully pull the motherboard out of the case I was able to finally pull the cmos batt connector. I am leaving it overnight to see what happens. This is my grandsons pc and I would like to fix it before getting him a new one in a few months. I have heard that the bios update to v1.24 will allow for up to 4gb memory. I have win7 64bit on it now so even if I get it going I might try to do the flash to v1.24.
*end edit*

 

[mohavepc]

Success! Thank you BassFisher for reminding me about the cmos. I was being lazy and not wanting to dissassemble the entire unit.

 

[mohavepc]

as an aside. the bios update did not provide support for 4gb of ram without updating the proc to dual core or better. se'la'vie
main thaing it is functioning on 2gb ram at good speed. fast enough for his minecraft account anyhow. Thanks again Bassfisher and Thanks for such a great forum. See ya next Year
Happy New Year All