Hi all, i've recently got my hands on some old company hardware that i used to work on because i used to work there. Long story short, company went belly up and had to close down. They sold everything including Dell servers/workstations/PDA's etc etc etc.

I got a great deal on a couple $40 a pop from a friend that was close to our old manager. Problem is, the BIOS is locked down completely. And if anyone knows Dell support, they're as useless as wisdom teeth. :P

So i tried everyting, i pulled the old HD out and put it in another desktop, HP Pavilion and it would be forced to boot via Network PXE. When i tried to put my old SATA HD in the Dell Optiplex workstation it would boot, except the USB ports were disabled. And unless i get the prior owners to a company that no longer exists to agree that they will allow Dell to give me access to the BIOS recovery CD, i just bought 5 heavy pieces of metal and plastic.

So ofcourse the latter wont pan out and im not going to even try, i thought about Googling some BIOS software and i found here. Im planning on trying this last daring stunt and hope that i can succeed. But i've never done this before and i cant seem to find any tuts on this. So i was wondering if anyone has used this before and what the out come was for x86 Dell motherboards. Thanx in advance!

Doesn't it have an NVRAM clear jumper on the motherboard?

Yes, its actually green though. Without that jumper removed you cant edit the boot sequence. But i think i found a solution that doesnt require me to use Open Firmware. Im to understand that OpenFirmware has a possibility of bricking motherboards. So i probably wont play around with it.

If these BIOS-es are locked by passwords try to remove CMOS battery for some time. It should help.