Hello there, Success in defeating the password! It was not that easy: Many of you wrote, that I should pull out the CMOS-battery. So I looked for one, but there was nothing on that board, which looked like a battery. So I copied the little program from Miroslav, which corrupts the checksum of the CMOS to my Harddisk, unplugged it and plugged it into this motherboard. But unfortunately the system even had a boot password on it. So no way. But there was an IC on the board, that was a little larger than the others, so I thougt, it might perhaps contain a battery. It was labelled: benchmarq bq3287AMT. So I did a little search on the web about this, and bingo: It is a RTC unit with builtin CMOS and battery. (For further information: http://www.benchmarq.com/prod/bq3287.html). I found some additional information at http://users.powernet.co.uk/sysserv/page126.html It says, that you should shortcut pin 12 and pin 21 with power off to clear CMOS. Unfortunately, the socket had pin 21 removed, so I could make no connection. So I pulled the IC out and shortcutted them. When I booted again: Enter Password: So I thought, might need a longer time to clear CMOS. Left it standing connected. No way, I booted: Enter password: So I made a little connector out of a piece of aluminum foil and put it into the empty pin 21 connector of the IC-socket, put the IC in and connected via this connector. No way. Last chance was to use brute force. So I left the pins connected and put the computer ON. And guess what: It worked. It said: CMOS-battery low, replace and run Setup. So I removed the connector again. On the next boot it said: CMOS-checksum corrupted, run Setup So I ran it, and from now on everything worked fine. I will contact the maintainer of the webpage mentioned above, that it doesn't work with power off, and that the power should be on. Long mail, but I hope it helps, that if anybody ever encounters such a chip on his board he or she doesn't have to fight such a hard struggle. Regards, Daniel P.S.: Thanks for all the replies, although none of them did the trick, I at least got some ideas on where to start.
> I <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I found a pretty nice 486 PCI-motherboard in the bulk waste last week, > which I would like to use as secondary computer with debian. The board is > working, but unfortunately, it was setup in a way that you can only boot > from harddisk, and shadow RAM was enabled. So I tried to change the > settings, but the preliminary user has installed a Setup-Password, so that > I can't access the BIOS. I know, that there are ways to get around this, > but I don't know how to do it in this special case. > So does anybody know where to find the necessary information? Is there a > tool for Linux or DOS to access and change BIOS-settings (I could plugin > the harddisk from another computer and try to boot into Linux or use the > small DOS-partition I have on this disk). Or is there some kind of cheat > password, which will always work? > The BIOS is a Phoenix version 4.04.