Okay, so I had the same Acer problem everyone had. Keyboard won't work, touchpad won't work. USB and Disc Drive won't work. I pretty much tried every suggestion people had. Nothing worked so I just put it on a shelf and forgot about it.
Today I pulled it out and turned it on. My god, the keyboard arrows worked. I got everything to work just fine and was done with it and turned it off. When I restarted the screen stayed black. I tried restarting with the battery out, in, direct charge unplugged, plugged in. Nothing worked. So I took out the hard drive and plugged it into my windows box to make sure it was fine, it was. I put it back in the Acer and the screen showed up. Yay. Again I was done with it and turned it off, on restart I had a black screen again. I repeated the hard drive removal and it turns out it was just coincidence. It's still black and nothing I'm trying is working. It randomly worked again, but froze in the boot process.
So it seems it fixed itself as far as control is concerned, just won't let me see what I'm doing until it feels like it, which so far seems to have no order.
Any ideas? Hardware? Software? If this helps there is no data on there that needs recovering and Ubuntu 10.10 will be installed on it.
