i cant change my system bios so that it boots from the cdrom before the hard drive, all the shit is greyed out

so is it possible to do it in windows? because that menu is being a prick?

alternatively what would happen if i unplugged my hdd s it booted from the second device (cd rom) and then plugged it back in so that i could reinstall windows on it?

thanks

If you have nothing to lose* on your bios settings then pop out your CMOS Battery and leave it for 10 mins. Then pop it in and try again to get into the BIOS and see if it works

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Originally posted by Nathan
If you have nothing to lose* on your bios settings then pop out your CMOS Battery and leave it for 10 mins. Then pop it in and try again to get into the BIOS and see if it works

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no, just set back to all factory default settings

nothng to lose, such as boot options, boot password etc

NO it wil reset the settings.

hm, boot options.... will i have to re enter ide drives etc?

wheres the battery located?

thanks

all the drives should auto-detect, or be able to be set to auto-detect. You might need to change the boot order to whatever

it will be on the MoBo, round, silver-like. maybe 2cm in diameter, 2-3mm thick
http://images.google.ca/images?q=computer+battery

On the motherboard. And know you wont.
Its a little round silver battery.

i unplugged the hdd, the windows cd booted, plugged it in and it worked... its formatting now!

just thought take out hdd, removes it from loading at boot... thus loading cd, yay! hopefully wont fuck it right up

Never ever remove the battery if you:
1) are not the admin of the pc
2) don't know what all the settings were (yes, only very rarly the default settings are all used!!!!!)

Now, you didn't tell if there are actually more options to choose from (in theory) for the bootsequence. This is highly important to answer your question.

This is because not all BIOSes (mostly the old ones) support an "alternative" boot sequence which includes cdroms and other media.

So it could have been this why you can't change it. However, in your last post you gave a hint that the cdrom is listed together with the HDD in the bootsequence. So the above doesn't apply.

In that case, it can be that some BIOS settings are locked with an administrating pasword. This is not the same password which you possibly need to type to enter the BIOS. In certain BIOSes you can set levels of passwords and depending on the level you can change certain stuff...

If it isn't that, then I have no idea why you couldn't change it...

quote:

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
In that case, it can be that some BIOS settings are locked with an administrating pasword. This is not the same password which you possibly need to type to enter the BIOS. In certain BIOSes you can set levels of passwords and depending on the level you can change certain stuff...

If it isn't that, then I have no idea why you couldn't change it...

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