Thats what I thought also but first something with bios that screwed up should have never been shiped and second the owner of the machine is concerned with warrenty issues that a bios upgrade could cause. This machine is only a few months old. IMHO a person should not have to screw around for hours to simply be able to begin to install a different OS. Even with the cheep low end machines I have never seen anything like this!! Also my MAIN point is that the bios must have almost been made that way on purpose for it to not reconise any HDD with a non Microsux OS on it. I would guess that it would be possible to get a bios upgrade from intel but difficult at best to get one from Gateway but I may look into it further.
Marc
If its an Intel motherboard, perhaps you should look around on intels site for the Intel reference bios for the machine..
remove gateway from the equation altogether.. (or did you just mean an intel chipset?)
Do you have a non gateway supplied hard disk that you could install mandrake on it and install??
I have had machines that didn't seem to want to install linux, and in those cases, I have just put the drive into an old PII box I have here that always works, and swap the drive back when its done.. its worked well for me many times...
but if the harddisk has some firmware that (along with the mb bios) looks for an MS boot or something, then a drive that didn't come from gateway might be worth trying.
If it really turns out that the machine won't boot any non MS OS, then the first thing I'd do is put up a web site about it and tell everyone you can, including any IT sites I could find.. I'd also tell the DOJ or whatever about it..
It doesn't get more Anticompetitive then that, and if the machine is only capable of running windows, then it should be advertised as such.
-- rgds
Frank Hauptle (aka Franki)
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