Clearing out a BIOS password on an acer aspire one

My mom set out to look for a new laptop recently. She had been using the same one for years. Not a good one to start with, it had long lived past it's usefulness. She wanted something small and fairly cheap.  Her needs aren't great.  She decided on a netbook, the acer aspire one 722.


Somehow in the first day she managed to set a bios password and a windows password that didn't work anymore.  From talking to her over the phone it sounded like she had put a password on the hard drive.  Thus encrypting the drive and making it useless.  Acer wanted $100 to fix the password problem.  So my mom decided to buy a new version of the same netbook and give me the one with the broken password.  I thought if nothing else I could put a spare hard drive in it and have a new netbook to replace my old hp.

Once I got my own hands on the netbook, I quickly realized it was a bios password and not an encrypted hard drive.  To google I hurried and searched for how to clear the bios password from an acer aspire one. It took a bit of searching but I eventually found this forum thread http://www.laptop-forums.com/aspire-one-ao722-bios-recovery-t23653.html

I followed the instructions and it worked. I am going to do a slightly more detailed instructions below since a few steps were left out or unclear in the forum post.

1. Go to http://www.acer.com and download the latest bios for you model from the support area. Mine is the 722
2. Format a USB stick using the FAT filesystem
3. In the DOS directory of the extracted bios zip file is a .bin file.  Mine was P1VE6111.bin
4. Copy that .bin file to the USB stick and rename to BIOS.fd
5. Remove the battery and power cable from the aspire one
6. Plug the USB stick into a USB port.  I used the one on the left side of my aspire one 722
7. Press and hold "fn" and "esc" keys.
8. Plug in the AC cord
9. While still holding the "fn" and "esc" keys push and release the power button 
10. Continue to hold the "fn" and "esc" key until it starts beeping (boy are they loud)
11. It will beep loudly for about a minute
12. Then after another minute or so it will reboot and you should be able to access the bios without a password.

sumber :