Acer Aspire 3680 Laptop Logo
Posted on Jan 06, 2009

Boot problem Received an Acer Aspire One Laptop for Christmas. My problem is the computer will not boot up! If automatically cuts off after the Windows XP logo comes up. Any ideas? I cannot get it to start,it wants an hdd password .I don't have a disk sice hurricane Gustav this summer ,and am desparate Gwen Clare Michelle, [email protected]

  • Anonymous May 11, 2010

    common prombelm have seen this in many costomers computers hard drive is shot need to comtacted acer and tell them you need a new hard drive 120 geg and 80 toshiba hard drives i have changed 8-9 nine of them lala linda

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  • Posted on Jan 06, 2009
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There are three possible options ranging from free (if you are not afraid to open your laptop, locate and remove the bios battery) to $170 (for a new hard drive and a cloning kit).

Option 1: Here is a copy of an email from Acer Support:
Thank you for contacting Acer America. I apologize for the delay in responding to your inquiry. In order to have the BIOS or hard disk password removed (This include any biometric security), the notebook will need to come in to our repair depot for password removal. This service is not covered by warranty and unfortunately there is no other recourse to remove a BIOS or HDD password from the notebook. The flat fee for BIOS password removal is $100.00 US dollars plus tax. If it is a BIOS or HDD password and you would like us to service it for you, please contact our telephone technical support line at 1-800-816-2237. Hours of operation are 7am-9pm CST Monday-Friday and 8am-5pm CST Saturday and Sunday, excluding holidays.

Option 2: Resetting an Acer BIOS Password Using Hardware.
If you cannot boot the Acer and don't want to send your computer back to Acer for an unknown amount of time, you can try to reset the BIOS password via hardware.
Tech FAQ Forum members have reported that they were able to remove their Acer BIOS passwords by simply opening their notebooks and removing the CMOS batteries for 30 minutes.
Once your BIOS password is removed, you will need to press the <F2> key during POST (Power On Self Test) to enter the Acer BIOS setup.

Option 3: Possibly resetting BIOS Password using Hard Drive Upgrade Kit and a new Hard Drive.
A colegue told me that he used a hard drive upgrade kit and during the cloning process the hard drive password was erased. He can not recall providing the password when he booted from the bootable cloning CD provided with the Kit and when he replaced the hard drive with the cloned one and botted the laptop, the hard drive password was gone! He had to go into bios to manually enter a new hard drive password.
The kit he used was about $50 - APRICORN EZ-UP-UNIVERSAL 2.5" USB 2.0 Hard Drive Upgrade Kit - Retail. He paid for a bigger hard drive separately, but he just needed bigger hard drive (and found out about the password erasure by accident).

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