LifelineIT
Member
- Reaction score
- 24
- Location
- Fairmont, WV
Edit: Solved, sorry, I should have asked here two months ago. I figured it out myself. Scroll to bottom for solution.
Greetings---it's been a while, hi everyone.
I've got a system here that is actually just an off-lifecycle machine that I would like to use for my son. Nothing special, just a little old Dell Optiplex 760 small form factor.
If I plug in the machine and boot, it'll go right to an old XP Pro login screen. That'd be great if anyone still knew the password, the machine is from before a merger and all those techs are gone. No problem changing those passwords, however...boot order is set to HDD exclusively, and I cannot get to BIOS.
If I press F2 or F12 at boot it'll just beep and me and stop. Sounds like it's still booting, just no display. Apparently there may be a BIOS bug where it halts display output...can't update the BIOS until I can get into windows because I can't see the screen.
I tried popping in an alternative drive, thinking I could limp it through enough to update bios. Won't boot.
So I can't change boot order via boot menu, I can't see the BIOS, I can only boot into the XP drive inside the machine but I don't have a password for it.
It occurs to me that maybe I can pull the drive and plug it in externally and change the hive from there, never done that. Any suggestions?
SOLUTION: As stated, I'd tried many things including yanking/resetting the CMOS. None of that affected the bugged BIOS not showing me display. I realized I had tried slaving in a different drive but I hadn't tried slaving out this drive. I threw it in a bench system, booted to NT Offline, changed the on-machine Administrator account password successfully. (Was a domain machine.) Replaced and rebooted and got into the Administrator account, ran the Dell bios update utility, which reboots the machine. I did NOT have display while it installed, I just left it go and I think I pressed Enter in case it wanted confirmation. After about 8 minutes it rebooted and now I have BIOS/Boot Menu options. We have liftoff!
Greetings---it's been a while, hi everyone.
I've got a system here that is actually just an off-lifecycle machine that I would like to use for my son. Nothing special, just a little old Dell Optiplex 760 small form factor.
If I plug in the machine and boot, it'll go right to an old XP Pro login screen. That'd be great if anyone still knew the password, the machine is from before a merger and all those techs are gone. No problem changing those passwords, however...boot order is set to HDD exclusively, and I cannot get to BIOS.
If I press F2 or F12 at boot it'll just beep and me and stop. Sounds like it's still booting, just no display. Apparently there may be a BIOS bug where it halts display output...can't update the BIOS until I can get into windows because I can't see the screen.
I tried popping in an alternative drive, thinking I could limp it through enough to update bios. Won't boot.
So I can't change boot order via boot menu, I can't see the BIOS, I can only boot into the XP drive inside the machine but I don't have a password for it.
It occurs to me that maybe I can pull the drive and plug it in externally and change the hive from there, never done that. Any suggestions?
SOLUTION: As stated, I'd tried many things including yanking/resetting the CMOS. None of that affected the bugged BIOS not showing me display. I realized I had tried slaving in a different drive but I hadn't tried slaving out this drive. I threw it in a bench system, booted to NT Offline, changed the on-machine Administrator account password successfully. (Was a domain machine.) Replaced and rebooted and got into the Administrator account, ran the Dell bios update utility, which reboots the machine. I did NOT have display while it installed, I just left it go and I think I pressed Enter in case it wanted confirmation. After about 8 minutes it rebooted and now I have BIOS/Boot Menu options. We have liftoff!
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