A while ago our server seems to have a hard disk failure as the following error messages kept coming up: hda: dma timeout error: [...] hda: dma_timer_expiry: [...] We exchanged the 20 GB HD against my old Mac's 4.7 GB HD and reinstalled the system. A friend of mine tried the "broken" 20GB HD on a Windows system and said it works fine.
If you manually want to syncronize your computer's clock with a time server: sudo /usr/sbin/ntpdate tick.keso.fi
Macs don't have a BIOS. They have something called Open Firmware instead. So the BIOS password is called Open Firmware password. You boot into Open Firmware by pressing the command (=apple), option, O and F keys simultaneously during system boot. To set the password type password To enable the protection type setenv security-mode full An then reboot by typing reset-all Apart from the full security mode you can also set "none" (= don't ask password during boot) and "command" (=gives you only limited access to Open Firmware without the password.