hello all,
i attempted to restore my Acer Chromebook R11 (CB5-132T) “cyan” with a firmware backup I made in January 2023 to the first Chrome OS version available on the device on this website, cros.downloads: Recovery Images - Chrome OS Downloads to which i was directed to by a Reddit post after seeing the demise of Chrome100.dev.
restoring the factory firmware from the backed up file in KDE neon with the Firmware Utility Script went smoothly, and after powering off the device in Linux, I had to reconnect the battery to boot (explanation further below).
the device turned on to the stock firmware correctly, and i allowed the device to start an OS verification with the CTRL+D developer mode/“unverified” boot. the USB restore seemed to be going perfectly, and it told me that it was only able to restore the older version of CrOS because OS verification was off, but it seemed to be going along fine anyways.
after waiting for a few minutes, the recovery screen said there was an “unknown error”. i was able to switch to the other TTYs for debug information. i’ve been daily driving Debian for the past 6 years on my desktop and constantly deal with things like this in my hobbyist life, so i figured i’d see anything out of the ordinary in the console, but i had no luck.
i figured trying again was the best path here, so i disconnected and reconnected the battery after a few minutes of the device staying static on this screen to try again.
upon rebooting, however, the device powered on without any display, probably before any POST happens. no OS verification or damaged ChromeOS screen, only the blue light to tell me that the device is “on”. the charge light also works as well.
my main issue is that the Power button on the side of my device and the lid are both completely nonfunctional in both CrOS and Coreboot firmwares and the OS itself. the device is also completely unresponsive to any number of “recovery mode” or “recovery menu” or EC reset key combos on boot. usually i’d power on the device with my charger & shut down the device in software, but that’s not an option here- i have to manually disconnect the battery every time if i can’t power down the device in software.
i know that restoring the stock firmware on an EOL device is technically an unsupported configuration, and i’ll probably be turned away from help here, but i’m dealing with probable hardware problems now and just want some closure on whether i really trashed this device or not.
as some background, this isn’t the first time i’ve bricked a Chromebook, i also bricked my mom’s sand a couple years ago trying to revert to stock from a file backup with the Script, after i learned that Apollo Lake didn’t have proper audio support =P
if anyone has any pointers on what to do here, thanks in advance! :]