My laptop is running gentoo linux but I wanted to make my own minimalistic linux distro.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem but I need to repartition my hard drive for this.

I have the tools to do this (on a cd) but the problem I am encountering is the bios is locked.

The bios is locked and it boots from the hard drive first and then the cd-rom drive.

I don't have the bios password and the last place I took the laptop to for repair locked the bios, didn't fix the problem, and charged me $60 so they could "look" at it.

I fixed the original problem by myself but the bios is still locked and they claim they have no idea how it got locked.

Anyways...

Is there any way to make grub "go back" so to speak so that the computer will boot from a cd?

I can remove the hard drive and it will boot from the CD but that kinda defeats the purpose.

I'd be looking for a cmos battery to pop out, and leave it out for a while, and/or short the battery contacts to ground. Or sometimes there's a jumper on the mobo to short to reset the bios.

And any company that locked me out of my own bios would be getting karmic justice in one form or another!

What is the make / model of your laptop. Many manufactures store the BIOS password in an EEPROM so removing the CMOS battery in this case will not work. There could be a programmed function key that will bring up a boot menu that does not require BIOS access.

Also, google for backdoor bios passwords, it looks like most of the big names in bios have one (or more..)

Its a Toshiba Satellite A45-S121 laptop.

I have searched for hours and couldn't find anything useful.

I have taken the laptop apart but I couldn't find the CMOS so I assume its somewhere I can't get without taking the entire motherboard out.

Sadly it is legal for them to do that kind of thing to my laptop. After all what legal proof do I have that they did it? Not much.

Its a toshiba satellite A45-S121 laptop and I couldn't find any backdoor passwords that worked.

Strange..

I managed to get into the bios by using ESC + DEL + F1 but I can't edit anything.

In the bios it says password not set but I can't change anything.

I am stumped.

It also says the bios is managed by the OS. Whatever that means.

When the machine had windows on it, a program called hwsetup.exe managed the bios but I no longer have windows on it.

I suppose since nobody else answered that grub doesn't have such a feature.

Anyways I figured out that you don't need a seperate partition to make a LFS distro.