I thought I’d post this because I couldn’t find any instructions anywhere that worked on fixing blank screen on Acer Aspire 7551.

I had a blank screen on my Acer Aspire 7551. The power LED lit up, but the screen stayed black and no hard disk activity was detectable. I did some research online and soon learned that this was a BIOS problem common to Acer laptops. I found plenty of instructions about creating a Crisis Disk on a bootable USB stick, but none of them worked for me.

I downloaded Crisis Disk and the latest BIOS (1.18 at the time of writing). I replaced BIOS.WPH in the Crisis Disk folder with 1.18 and renamed it to BIOS.WPH. I ran wincris.exe by right-clicking and running as administrator. I got the prompt that the removable disk had been created, so I removed it, put it back in and was dismayed to find it empty.

So, I edited CRISDISK.BAT to the right drive letter (it’s set to A: by default) and ran that as an administrator. It complained about not being able to do a quick format, so it did a long one. Once that was done, I got a prompt that minidos.sys was missing and that was that. I tried changing minidos.sys to MINIDOS.SYS. I tried it on Windows 7 x64, Windows 8 x64 and Windows XP x86. Nothing worked.

But here’s what DID work. I ran wincris.exe as administrator, ejected the disk at the completed prompt and put it back in. It was still empty. But this time I copied and pasted the entire contents of the CRISDISK directory onto the USB stick. I popped it in to the Aspire 7551, held down Fn+Esc and BOOM. The USB stick started flashing! I’d been working at this for hours, so I began to get quite excited! The blue LED on the power button did NOT flash, but the USB carried on blinking away, so I left it for a while and was suddenly greeted by the BIOS screen! Yippee!

Hope this will help someone else out there. I’ll host the files myself for the sake of completeness. If this works for you, Tweet me and let me know!