Re: Bios Batter
On Fri, 26 May 2000, Robert Till wrote:
>Got a problem with a Fujitsu Lifebook, only its more hardware than linux
>I'm afraid. Can't do the linux til I solve this.
>
>Previous owner of my machine, in his infinite wisdom, passworded the
>bios. And set it up so that it can only boot from drive C: Took the
>machine apart, looked for a bios battery, or a jumper to reset the
>bios. Not available. Guy just graduated from my college. Having
>trouble making contact.
>
>Called Fujitsu, and they want $250 to reset the bios. I'd say the
>laptop is worth $400 tops. They say the battery is soldered in, and
>that only they can do it. Any suggestions for solving this problem
>greatly appreciated.
A good soldering station (I prefer Weller brand) should cost considerably
less than $100. As you are a college student the day's work you may spend in
disconnecting and reconnecting the battery should be worth a lot less than
$150.
However there are many other options, for example you could have a root
floppy disk and a copy of the kernel on the hard drive. You could use
loadlin or some similar tool to boot the kernel from the hard drive with the
root file system from the floppy. Then you could run fdisk (NB at this time
the hard drive will not be in use because the kernel file is not used after
being loaded - this means that you can change partitions without needing to
reboot). After fdisk you can create a file system, install lilo, and make it
boot a basic Linux setup from there.
I recommend testing the same proceedure on another machine first because if
you stuff it you won't be able to recover.
Good luck.
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