BIOS and system boot problems...

[wererat]

hello all,

here is a fast explanation of the problem... have a friend who allowed a past roommate to "update" their pc... he said he knew what he was doing... well he put 3 passwords in the bios: 1 on system start up, 1 on bios settings and 1 on bios administrator... these passwords are all different and this roommate has since been booted from the house and hasnt been seen or heard from for over a year....
ok... here is my problem... we have the password for system startup ... and we can use the pc for some things, however the pc does not recognize the cd drive nor the floppy... upon startup i dont believe that there is any activity with the a or c drive which leads me to believe the bios is set to boot from c only... because there is a password set in bios i cannot check boot sequence nor can i change it....
so i guess my question is....
is there a way to flash the bios without the system accessing the a or d drive?
OR
is there a way to remove these freaking passwords so we can get the pc back up n running???

thanks!!!!!!!!!!


oh: p.s. i have removed both the floppy n the cd drive and both work just fine in a separate system... so the hardware is not bad...

 

[Tedster]

depending upon the PC, you can erase the BIOS passwords with several methods. Some involve merely removing the CMOS battery and/or jumpering CMOS jumpers. Others are more intricate.

In general, if you are locked out in BIOS, there is nothing you can do until the BIOS is unlocked. BIOS functions are at the very core of the CPU.

 

[wererat]

sorry the system is a dell... not sure about much more than that...

i will try the cmos battery removal... other than that, is there any way 2 find out what else i can go or attempt

 

[sycoblast]

if it sa dell there is a jumper on the motherboard where you can unlock the password

 

[wererat]

thanks.... do u know where i can get the information on the jumper settings for the dell motherboards???