Acer :: Boot Issue On Aspire 2930 Laptop Corrupted BIOS

The strangest thing has happened to my Acer Aspire 2930 laptop today.

I shut it down last night as I normally do, then this morning I turned it on and it wouldn't boot. It goes through BIOS and startup, but then it stops. It doesn't start loading Windows XP from the hard drive, it doesn't recognise boot CDs/DVDs. When I go into the BIOS, everything looks normal except the boot portion. There are several options there, but they don't say what they normally say. For instance, the first boot device, the hard drive, is completely invisible. What I mean is that the option is just not there, but when you move the selection around with the keyboard, you can tell it's supposed to be there. Look below for a better explanation. The other options are there, but they aren't recognising the devices. I have a friend with the exact same laptop and her BIOS shows everything as it should be. She's here now and I'm typing this on her laptop because I now have two dead computers here at home.


I don't get it. It's almost like the BIOS somehow became corrupted. I didn' t even know this could happen without attempting to flash the BIOS or something, and that's not what happened. I have never flashed the BIOS on this laptop. Not only can I not figure out what happened, there doesn't seem any way to fix it. I mean, if the laptop doesn't recognise any devices to boot from... I was thinking about taking it apart and resetting the CMOS, taking out the battery. I think that's the best I can hope for at this point.

I don't have any way of cloning the BIOS from my friend's computer so I guess the next step would be to get a new BIOS chip if the CMOS reset doesn't work? The laptop is unfortunately one month over the one year warranty. I read that there's a way to get the laptop to read an external USB floppy diskette drive regardless of the status of the BIOS, you are supposed to hold the function key plus the escape key or something when you turn on the laptop a couple of times, and then it magically reads from the floppy drive. I would have to somehow buy or get a drive, but I haven't even seen such things in years. Things I can try?

Here is what my BIOS looks like compared to my friend's:

Mine:

2. IDE1 :
3. USB FDD :
4. Network Boot :
5. USB HDD :
6. USB CDROM :

My friend's:
1. IDE0 : Hitachi HTS542525K9SA00
2. IDE1 : HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50N
3. USB FDD :
4. Network Boot : Realtek Boot Agent
5. USB HDD :
6. USB CDROM :

As you can see, there is definitely something wrong with my BIOS and I believe that's what is causing the computer not to boot.