I got my new Acer Aspire from UPS yesterday. I installed 8GB of memory and then went into the BIOS to look at all of the settings. I changed two or three of them. I know I set F12 to produce a boot menu, and I disabled the Acer splash screen. I thought that I would see startup details (memory counting up, BIOS version, etc) if I disabled it. I then installed openSUSE Tumbleweed (their rolling release) from a thumb drive. The installation went perfectly.
However, I can't get back into the BIOS. I have absolutely no video until I am about 4 or 5 seconds into the openSUSE boot process, then the video is fine from that point on. I ran into a problem with Tumbleweed and tried to force a downgrade to openSUSE 13.2 (regular, non-rolling release). Now I have a mixed system, and my wireless no longer works. I expected that, but it was worth a shot.
However, I can't boot off of another thumb drive to replace my OS. I had set the thumb drive as the #1 boot device when I was in the BIOS, but it doesn't seem to have taken. If I try to boot off of a thumb drive, nothing happens. I get both green lights on the laptop, a beep (like it's starting to boot), and then it just sits there black. I let it sit for almost an hour last night. I've looked for a way to reset the BIOS settings (desktops usually have a jumper for this), but I can't find anything. Without being able to boot off of an external device (I also tried a USB DVD drive), I am left with a laptop with a broken OS.
I would greatly appreciate and help and/or advice! Thank you.