bios reset

[Draven]

dont suppose anyone knows how to reset the bios on a dell optiplex gsi?

one of the little darlings has managed to set a supervisor password on one here so the damn thing doesnt boot without the pass :mad: :annoyed:

[Baz]

take system battery out??

[Draven]

:annoyed: tried unplugging it and removing the battery for about 10 mins but that didnt seem to do anything

any other ideas?
i think it may have reset the bios but not cleared the password

[MrJynxx]

have you got the motherboard manual by any chance? Usually there's a jumper on the board that needs shorting to properly reset the bios.. It'll be mentioned in the manual..

[Draven]

nope, all that sort of documentation has been lost in the clutter and tidy of time

[Method0ne]

Depending on how old the board is, chances are the jumper you're looking for is (or should be) the only red coloured one in there, if there's no red one, then it's a case of either guesswork, or trying to find some pointers.

If there's a load of jumpers on the board, there's gonna be some small pinout readings printed somewhere there too, most likely, have a look and see what's what, though you may have trouble with cables etc getting in the way.

Failing any of that, look for a jumper on it's own, with no others really close by, probably labelled JP1, switch it around on the pins and try to fire the machine up, if it doesnt, then you got the right one, if it does, turn it off again pronto and change it back.

[ONION]

do you know the name and code of the motherboard mate?

[Draven]

just about the only jumper i can find on the board is next to the cmos battery but shorting it seems to do sweet not-a-lot

tried to identify the board, its an intel chipset but being in a dell the area where the intel model number etc should be is empty :rolleyes:

[ONION]

what about the computer model?
is dell optiplex gsi all you know about it?

[Draven]

pretty much in a nutshell

there was a sticker on the back with what might be the serial number and model code for the system, but unfortunately the system is at work and i am now at home (thank god, long day) and its on the 5th floor of the tower building :annoyed: :cry:

got tomorrow off too :notworthy

so it will probably be monday before i see it again, and will probably have to go back up there and sort all the machines out again cos the little vandals will have screwed them over in front of the teachers who dont seem to notice students trying to dismantle pc's :annoyed:

i've had a nightmare of a time this afternoon with other systems in that room, have a good OS and program image on cd which is 800mb, got all the way up there and found that the ghost floppies i took had comitted suicide since tuesday, remade them, already found i needed to use a different cd drive to the one fitted to the machines as they wont read large disks and kept giving unexpected end of file errors

then found that most of the machines wouldnt boot from the floppy as the nearly new floppy drives had already been shafted by the little darlings :annoyed:
so i had to go round the room sticking a known good cd and floppy drive on each machine one by one and imaging from cd :annoyed:

if only i could use ghostcast on them, but nooooo the onboard nvidia lan card wont do it :annoyed:

[fro]

I've had a couple of motherboards without bios reset jumpers, just had to remove the battery and short the battery connection itself (this was actually in the manuals).
This sounds a bit dodgy but it worked. Remember to disconnect from the mains first

[STiMPY]

The Dell service tag should be printed on the case somewhere (usually the back on the oldies). It's displayed in the BIOS as well. You can enter this number on the Dell website and it will give you everything of relevance to the machine including the manual. Usually, a clear CMOS jumper will be somewhere close to the battery. If you can't find it, you'll need to take the battery out as mentioned, but, in my experience, taking the battery out will either clear it in less than five minutes or you'll need to leave it out for at least 30 minutes. The clear CMOS jumper will be there somewhere though. On the older machines, there's a clear password jumper as well :)

[Draven]

reet, finally dragged my lazy ass up here

the sticker on the back says

MPD76
(38135058)

silver label on the bottom the additional info is model no: dc8

[Draven]

ah bloody sorted it like you said

http://docs.euro.dell.com/docs/systems/dzer/Jumpers.htm

bloomin hidden in what looks like cpu speed select section :rolleyes: