Greetings Earthlings,
This is an account of the nightmare i encountered after i decided to breathe new life into an aging laptop/notebook.
I had an Acer Aspire 5315 laptop / notebook which had come per-installed with Microsoft Vista Home Basic. I thought to myself "i know how to fix this monstrosity!!"
This was my plan:
- download Xubuntu 12.04 LTS image from: http://xubuntu.org/getxubuntu/
- Use unetbootin to create bootable usb removable drive http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
- Boot from usb removable drive (after checking the bios to ensure usb drive was the first boot option)
- Install Xubuntu 12.04 to hard drive using the entire Hard Drive (80GB) (completely eradicating Vista)
- Reboot. Enjoy!
These were my issues:
- Acer Aspire 5315 refused to boot from usb drive. Ok that ones easy burn a CD and do it the slow way.
- nearing the end of install computer just shut off completely. No warnings. No shutdown sequence. Nada!
- Rebooted with CD and tried another install, same thing happened.
the install seemed to go off after the main install had finished and it was downloading updates from the web. (i enabled networking in the install) - Rebooted with CD and repeated install but this time disabled networking. Same thing . Shutdown without warning.
- This time i booted without the cd just to see if the system installed at all.
- Got a no bootable device found message
- Googled and read i may have to set the boot flag manually by using GParted from the live CD (the try Xubuntu Option on the CD)
- I did this and viola!! it worked....BUT!!!!!
- after about 15 minutes...
- SHUTDOWN AGAIN!!!!
- Back to my best friend Google.
It turns out the Acer Aspire 5315 uses VISTA ONLY SOFTWARE to control and monitor the cpu fan (ePower from memory???) when running xubuntu the fan was NOT WORKING causing the laptop to overheat and subsequently SHUTDOWN , you know, to protect itself from melting.
The fix for this is Easy. (so it seemed, but more on that later). All i had to do was Update the BIOS.
Here's the link BIOS UPDATE LINK Or if you paranoid goto: http://www.acer.com.au/ac/en/AU/content/drivers
and do it yourself.
Now heres the REALLY ANNOYING PART. the BIOS flash utility needs to be run from WINDOWS But you see i had gotten rid of Vista during the install of Xubuntu. I thought it was absoulutley ridiculous that i may have to reinstall Vista just to accomplish a task that should take 30 seconds. (OK maybe 1 Minute. sorry for the exaggeration ) Then i stumbled upon a tool that SAVED MY DAY!
The answer to my prayers was:
http://www.hirensbootcd.net
It's a boootable CD that has a thing called "mini XP" which you can run windows programs from. I burned a CD popped it in The Acer Aspire 5315 booted up Choose the mini XP option and in about 30 seconds had a xp desktop put my usb stick in that i had copied the bios update to ran it (after extracting it) and let it do it's thing.
IMPORTANT: make sure you have power connected to the laptop you DO NOT want to interrupt the BIOS FLASHING PROCESS. while on that note it's probably a good idea to let the laptop COOL DOWN first in case it shuts off while Updating the BIOS.
Well i rebooted and all is SWELL i left the laptop on for 2 hours running a openGL screensaver and it aint even warm!!!
I HOPE this post finds some poor soul who needs to update their Acer Aspire Laptop / Notebook BIOS without WINDOWS installed on their hard drive.