>change ram
>suddenly works
>no sodlering bullshit required

and if you get into bios, he's probably change the mode from ahci to raid or some shit too. most retards tend to do that.

>>51992186
It's a laptop with 1 HDD bay, I don't think it even HAS raid option in the bios. We could try with only one ram stick at a time, try both sticks and see if it changes anything.

>>51992235
You'd be unlucky if it wasn't ram
normies like to drop their laptops on the couch/bed and make the hard drive skip and ram come loose.

>>51992186
Nah, he would have changed Always Enable PEG to Enabled. I did the same thing with my Aspire 7750G a few years back. Couldn't reset the BIOS by taking out the CMOS, and I couldn't force flash new BIOS. Someone said it fucked something up with the CPU, so I ended up sending it back to Acer and they fixed it for free.

There's no setting in the BIOS that would prevent booting on a laptop, especially in the way that it's not booting for you.

>>51992404
My brother got it himself second hand for dirt cheap. it had a bad screen connector so he ordered one on ebay and replaced it (He isn't completely incompetent). It worked perfectly for 2 weeks until he was messing around with the BIOS and messed it up.

>>51992404
Interesting, might be what he did. I really hope it wasn't a problem with the CPU though, this laptop has a decent i5 and its BGA so no replacing it... The replacement mobos cost more than he paid for the laptop to begin with.

Has ANYONE here re-flashed a bios chip without using windows or the bios utilities before? SPI is standard enough there must be a way to do it from a pi, but does anyone know how?

>>51992591
This is actually a common problem with laptps in this series https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/4-windows-8-asus-machines-not-booting.48024/
Same problem, exact same symptoms, but no one has a solution ecpt for sending it back for RMA / warranty.

>>51992610
Google it and there should be something in the first result, you'll probably need a few resistors or something.

>>51992106
Reflow it. I deal with this a ton at work. Look up a guide on how to do it. Pretty easy. So long as you do it properly with enough heat it should fix it ezpz. Make sure to completely remove the board when you do this. Some guides tell you to out it in the oven for a while, but a heat gun works best, as you're much less likely to ruin something. Be thorough and take your time or you risk it either not taking, or ruining it forever.

>>51993029
>acer s56ca-bh51-cb
The board wasn't exposed to any significant heat between working and not working, and the thing that triggered it was changing some bios settings. The laptop is in new enough condition and given the trigger for the problems, suggesting something desoldered itself is a bit of a stretch. The bios chip itself only has 4 pins, is very isolated on the board, and we also followed the traces out and tested between the pins of the chip and that point with a multimeter and all the connections check out.

If it is the CPU or something needing to be reflowed, I'm pretty SOL. Never once had success trying to reflow a chip. I'll try literally everything else before it comes to that, but I'll keep it in mind.

>>51993308
Edit bios chip has 8 pins