BIOS on Michael’s Domain

Booting my Lenovo ThinkPad X390 from USB

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s sometimes harder than you think to boot a computer from a USB stick. It takes two non-trivial skills to pull it off:

Clearing the BIOS password in a HP Compaq Elite 8000

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Power the computer down, remove power cable (and other cables that can carry electricity) and let residual charge drain. Open lid and remove the green jumper. Reboot and you’re done. Maybe you want to put the green jumper back not to loose them (you can also apparently leave it attached to pin 1 or pin 2, but not connect both pins).

The BIOS Password of Macintosh computers (Open Firmware)

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

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. The Open Firmeware password can be removed by changing the amount of RAM and three times zapping the PRAM. More detailed information is available .

How to boot into the BIOS of a Dell Precision WorkStation 410MT to change to SCSI booting

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Why do all hardware producers make up their own key combinations to access the BIOS? I never remember. This time it was an old DELL, that forced me to download the user manual: It is Ctrl+Alt+Enter. I needed to change the boot priority in the BIOS to enable scsi booting. Funnily grub confuses the disks and you manually have to specify the correct root(hd0,1) in the /boot/grub/menu.lst. Grub writes its guess of hard disk order to /boot/grub/device.map, but the guess was wrong in my case.