Acer Aspire S3-391 BIOS Recovery / BIOS Password Remove / No Bootable Device issue

hi,
i am having big issue with my Acer Aspire Ultra-thin book S3-391-6046 laptop. i recently updated its BIOS from 2.0x to 2.17 version which showed successful, it rebooted and came online fine. i re-ran the BIOS updater again by mistake, ideally it should exist or give me a message that BIOS is already latest version or no update required, instead it continued, rebooted Laptop and started block update. however this time after performing the activity, when Laptop was rebooted, it showed "no boot device" and kept showing this even-though there are two bootable USB flash drives connected, one is having Hiren's boot-cd and the other one Windows 8. with the same USB drives, it was previously booting, and in fact i did Windows 8 installation on this Laptop using the one bootable USB drive having Windows 8 installer.

i tried using boot-device selection option during BIOS start-up by pressing F12, it shows the same message "no bootable device". i bought this Laptop quite some time back from eBay and it had a password set in BIOS which didn't bother me so far because of the Laptop was booting properly. now i can't have the password anymore. i wanted to go in BIOS by pressing F2 and see what are the disk-drives its detecting, and also choose what to boot-up from. as i am unable to go in, i tried to remove BIOS password from CMOS. i opened the back-cover and tried few ways that i found by Google, though the methods were specific to other models which are older and not anything specific to my model or any Acer Ultra-thin book, eventually i didn't succeed. the method i found in below:

Acer Aspire S3-391 Service Manual (Page 165 of 194)

i suspect the issue is with the BIOS which may have got corrupted. the other way i tried to recover the BIOS to the default state what may be saved inside the Motherboard. i tried the generic way that i found in Google, again this time too the method was not specific to my model, but it appeared to me that the method would work. detail method i found in following threads:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/284686-aspire-5315-bios-recovery-using-usb-thumbdrive.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...-your-phoenix-bios-bios-recovery-methods.html

now, with these options, it didn't work. now i am not sure what else i should do before going to professional service-shop which would cost a lot. if anyone can advise a solution, i will be happy to give it a shot.

let me know if you have any question. Laptop is still continuing showing "no boot deice" message. Laptop has a 320 GB HDD, 20 GB SSD.

thanks.

 

try this: remove the CMOS battery, wait for a couple of mintues, reset it, restart

 

hi Maro12,
thanks for your reply. will this reset the BIOS password only or also do the recovery? and where exactly the CMOS battery is located in Acer Aspire S3-391 Laptop?

 

read this article it explains how to remove the CMOS battery, make sure the laptop is turned off before doing this
3 Ways to Reset Your BIOS - wikiHow
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-034245.htm
http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/recoverybiosupdateinstructions.pdf

can you get access to BIOS settings during the startup?

 

I have tried removing the CMOS battery and leaving it connected for approx. 30 minutes. Upon reconnecting the CMOS, restarting the PC and entering BIOS where it prompts me to enter the password. The default password does not work. I recently installed Windows 7 and I am unable to not only update my BIOS so that I can install an SSD but now my USB ports do not recognize any drives or peripherals that I attach to it. The USB ports still provide power to anything that is connected. This was not an issue until I installed Windows 7. I am at my whits end. I like this PC at it is a more than capable machine for my needs but i need to be able to connect peripherals and USB drives. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

did you downgrade from Win8 to Win7? can you enter Windows at all?
if so follow this guide it gives some clear ways to solve the usb issue.
Dead USB Port? Here's How to Diagnose and Fix It!

try to remove the bios jumper to a different location, look at this link it tells you how to do it
3 Ways to Break a BIOS Password - wikiHow