Hi gabng, LOOONG time no post for me, heh. Anyway, I have a question and I am betting the tech heads here have more than enough solutions, so, here goes.<
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I picked up an old workstation from a bus comany a couple weeks ago. The other night, I finally got around to booting it up and I noticed the CD drive didn't appear under My Computer (or anywhere else for that matter) I figured the only way to rectify this was through the setup as Windows loaded, so, in I went.<
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Turns out (I should have figured) that the IT crew there password protected the setup and I can't get in. There's nothing on the system that could be considered "important" or confidential, it was just a workstation, previously connected to the network. <
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I want to get the CD drive going, so I can load some stuff on I want to use and I am looking for ways to get past the password protection. A few notes that may help:<
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It's an old AMD 233 processor, running Win98<
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I am not against formatting and re-installing Windows<
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I am comfortable (to a point) tinkering around "under the hood" so to speak if required.<
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Any help or ideas would be truly appreciated. The unit is not connected to the internet right now, but if I absolutely HAD to, I could try to get it on through my normal connection (the machine does have an ethernet port) <
> 90% Solo stalker.<
> 10% Group backbone.<
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61st Season Savage Lord<
> mailto:falwith@hotmail.com<i></i>

There should be a jumper on the motherboard to reset the BIOS to factory defaults. - Leo<i></i>

Since it's an old system, some motherboards back then didn't have jumpers. You had to yank the CMOS battery for awhile to get it to clear. <
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[Tynkur Toyz][66 Gnomish Arch Convoker][Email][Magelo]<
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OK, in either case, I'm assuming this reset will purge all bios settings, but not affect the OS? I just want to make sure I have all the stuff I need handy when I do get it rolling properly, to not end up halfway through a process and find out "Oh, I need my Win98 CD and it's not here" kind of thing.<
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Would I be best off finding a pic of both the jumper and the battery before jumping in, or will the battery be rather obvious? By being somewhat comfortable, I meant I can add RAM or simple cards to the machine, or swap out a CD drive. I'm not averse to finding and pulling a battery or crossing a jumper to get this going, but I wouldn't mind getting a peek at what I'm trying to do if it's more than "bingo" obvious.<
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Sorry if I sould dense, but I don't generally have time (nor the ambition) to get to know a lot about the guts of my machine and how it all runs. I do read a lot, though, so kind of on topic, might anyone suggest a decent book (or series) to begin to better understand the inner workings of this irritating box? I don't want to become a tech pro, but having a grasp of the basics would be nice. <
> 90% Solo stalker.<
> 10% Group backbone.<
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61st Season Savage Lord<
> mailto:falwith@hotmail.com<i></i>

CD-Rom not appearing probably have to do the jumper on the CD-Rom itself. <i></i>

In a nutshell, with the power off, locate the model number of the CD-ROM drive. Then scour the internet for the jumper settings for Master & Slave settings.<
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The main bootable drive will already be set for Master, so you want to make sure they've got the CD set as the slave.<
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If that's set up properly, it could also be a
oken IDE cable.<
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As for the BIOS, for the most part it won't affect the OS. There are some things that can and will be changed by resetting the BIOS. Sometimes IRQs get shifted around, Parallel ports are in a different mode, power management is different, etc. In these cases, the Windows CD may possibly be needed to complete the install(*). Your best bet is to make sure the Master/Slave function is working before you delve too deep into the BIOS.<
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(*) You can often get around this by pointing driver installation paths to c windowssystem or system32 when it asks for drivers if you don't have the CD handy, but this may not always work. It often works, though, when you've had the stuff installed previously bust just got jostled around for some reason. <
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[Tynkur Toyz][66 Gnomish Arch Convoker][Email][Magelo]<
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Remove the battery and count two full minutes, then put it back. The system will have reverted to factory defaults. Tranthas Stormwalker<
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Quote: Remove the battery and count two full minutes, then put it back. The system will have reverted to factory defaults.<
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With the power cord unplugged, too. Obvious, but worth noting. ---------------------------------<
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Burog Warrior of Oryx<i></i>

Yeah. And that's the CMOS battery on the MB, not the normally-removable-in-laptops kind. Tranthas Stormwalker<
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