A friend has bestowed upon me an old laptop, a Gateway model MX3231. I’ve replaced the hard drive, as that seems to be why he trashed it. Anyway, I need to reformat the HD, so I threw in the Windows CD, thinking it would boot up.
Nope. Choosing the “Boot Menu,” I have an option to boot from the hard drive, or from the network. Well, I can’t boot from the hard drive, since there’s nothing on it to boot from.
I figured I’d go into the BIOS to figure out why it isn’t trying to boot from the CD, but upon entering the BIOS, I’m prompted for a password. Friend says he never set a BIOS password, and Gateway support is less than helpful, since the laptop is out of warranty.
Ergo, my thought is to reset the BIOS and clear the password. I need to find the CMOS battery to do that, though-- and that’s where you guys come in.
I don’t see it on the motherboard. My guess is that the CMOS battery is like those on a regular board. That means it’s a flat “mercury” battery like those in a wristwatch.
I am sure you’re going to have lots of fun with this project:eek:
Me, too. On both counts. It won’t be that bad, if I can get it to boot from the CD.
I can’t tell, either; I have yet to actually get it out of the laptop casing. I was hoping it’d be in an easily accessible place–behind one of the panels, perhaps, but not from what I can see. More than half of that motherboard is hidden behind the case itself, and I don’t know if I’m up to digging it out this evening.
Do Gateways usually come with default BIOS passwords? Or is there a way to just get it to boot from the optical drive the way it’s set up?
If you put a bootable CD in and it didn’t boot, it’s most likely set in the BIOS not to boot from the optical drive. What’s odd is I can’t think of a good reason to do that (is there a 3.5inch floppy on it), which means someone probably futzed with the BIOS settings which is probably the same person that set the password.
OTOH, the optical drive might not be working.
Sometimes getting at the motherboard means taking screws out of the bottom and then pulling the keyboard off.
Okay from what I can tell from the picture, in the center on the right side of that picture, there appears to be a round silver thing underneath some black tape. I’d start looking there. Otherwise, look for the BIOS chipset and it would be near that.
You need a BOOTABLE OS CD To do this . Upgrade XP OS CD’s will NOT work. If your XP OS CD will not boot it is likely an upgrade version.
You have these options.
Remove and format the notebook drive as a slave drive on desktop using a 3.5 to 2.5 adapter (cheap) and make the laptop disk partition bootable.
Alternatively, if the notebook is older and has a floppy drive you can boot (with DOS partition utilities on the floppy) and make the disk bootable.
Once the hard disk is bootable access the CD drive letter and start the install process. if it is an upgrade CD you will need a Win 98 OS disk for it to verify upgrade status then away you go.
There are other methods to make the disk bootable using linux boot CDs and USB thumbdrives with an OS onboard but these are the most direct.
The easiest method is to procure a bootable XP OS disk with valid key.
My thoughts exactly. I believe the drive works, though–the last user reports using it just before the HD went bad, and it still spins up with a CD inserted during the boot up sequence–it just doesn’t boot from it.
Tried it with two different bootable CDs, no go.
Which sucks, for sure, if it’s anything like the last time I had to replace a laptop keyboard.
:dubious: I don’t mean to be rude, but did you even read the OP? I’m not looking for any jumpers that dictate bootability off a CD; I’m looking to pull the CMOS battery and dump the BIOS password.
As have I; unfortunately, I’ve never had a BIOS password stand in the way of changing the boot order of a device.
No, it’s not. I’m aware of the difference. I thought the implication was in my OP, but just to make it clear, I’m not a novice looking to toy around.
I did this; with a clean format, I got the “Operating system not found” error, and the laptop immediately reboots itself. With XP installed onto it, it gets pretty far into the process of loading the various Windows drivers, but then blue screens and reboots literally before I can read the (most likely unhelpful) message.
Which I have… but the key here is that it’s not TRYING to boot from the optical drive. My options are Hard Disk and Network. As if someone went into the BIOS at some point and disabled booting from the optical drive, and then put a password on it.
Tried it-- no dice. Still got Hard Disk and Network.
If only it had a floppy drive.
I suppose the crux of my question is–did Gateways of this era ship with default BIOS passwords, or did someone set it and forget it? My guess is that booting from the optical drive has been disabled (the BIOS on my laptop has that option, though I can’t imagine why a home user would want to do so), but to find out, I’d need to get into the BIOS.
USB floppies are available if that’s the only way in.
If you disassemble you may want to let it sit awhile after removing the battery as some units use a battery and capacitor backup and the capacitor has to discharge which may take awhile.
Since you can hook the drive up to another machine, try this:
On the other machine where you have a floppy, boot from a Win 98 floppy and format the drive as FAT 32 and bootable. You need to do this from the Win98 boot disk becase you can’t create a > 32 GB FAT32 partition in XP. Boot back into Windows and copy the whole XP CD into a subdirectory Install\XP and as many drivers as you can download into Install\Drivers. Particularly the network driver! Create a Config.sys / Autoexec.bat to load SMARTDRV to enable disk caching. Then put the HDD back into the laptop, boot, and install XP.
I use Kill CMOS that you can get here http://www.utilitygeek.com/BIOS-Tools-c1.html
but you would need a floppy for that. I suppose you could pull the hard drive and put it into a external usb enclosure then format and put the utility on there, replace, boot and then run the utility. seems kinda convoluted tho.
Thanks for all the helpful suggestions! Just wanted to drop in to share the resolution.
Before I dug deep into finding the CMOS battery, I wanted to try swapping the optical drive, just to make sure that wasn’t the problem. I’ve got an older laptop that won’t power up (I think the DC jack went out–a problem I have no idea how to fix, and am not really looking to pay to have fixed) with a DVD writer in it. Swapped it out in about 5 minutes and… yep, the optical drive went bad.
Booted from the Windows CD, reformatted, and works like a charm now. For the price of a hard drive (also stolen from my won’t-power-on laptop) and a DVD burner (net cost: $0), I now have another perfectly good computer!
Oh, and used a handy CMOS tool to wipe the BIOS password. Just in case I actually need to get in there in the future.
It won’t be that bad, if I can get it to boot from the CD.