On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 09:47:28AM -0600, Tom Penney wrote: > I haven't been following this thread closely so forgive me if this has > been covered. I have seen computers (old inexpensive compaq's I think) > with the bios info stored on a mini drive partition. I've trashed this > "bios Partion" in the past and had to download and make bootable > floppies to recreate it. The hard drive bios has to go down as one of > the stupidest ideas ever. > > I couldn't google up anything quickly to support my story so you may > think I'm crazy. I wouldn't believe it either. but several years ago I > did fix a computer that wouldn't boot without a partition on the primary > master drive for bios info. I concur! I use an old P200 compac for my firewall. It came with a 2GB hard drive, with a small partition that it used for bios. If you booted to bios, it brought up this circa windows 95 visual basic interface for _viewing_ your bios information (I was not able to actually change anything). I was able to nuke the partition and still have a functioning computer - I just can't access any bios information - but since I couldn't change anything with the interface anyway I don't care. Worth noting is that I bought this computer at computer renassiance a few years ago for $70 I think. I booted it up when I got it, and it went into win98. Looking around, they had deleted the "my documents" folder, but not emptied it from recycling bin. Apparently, the computer was used by the corporate headquarters for one of the big salon chains. I found some very interesting customer/personal information on there. There were a few letters to customers saying to the effect: "We're sorry that you had a bad experience at XXX salon. Your credit card number xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx expiration date xx/xx/xx has been refunded $13.95" I was shocked that companies are so stupid to leave stuff like that on there. Can you say lawsuit? I considered contacting the people who's information had been compromised, and I considered contacting the salon company. But in the end, knowing people who's innocent security alerts had resulted in criminal penalties, I just formatted the drive... Dan _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list