- Sep 23, 2002
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A coworker of mine brought over her Dell Inspiron 1520 Laptop for a reformat and upgrade to the OS (dual boot of XP and Ubuntu).
I went into the BIOS, but there is a master password, not allowing any changes to the BIOS (including not allowing me to change the first boot device to CD/DVD drive). Dell is willing to provide us with the "password unique to the machine" for $75 since the computer is out of warranty (by 6+ years).
I was thinking of putting the hard drive in another laptop formatting, and loading WindowsXP (all the files until it does the first complete restart),and then putting it back in the Dell laptop. I would then load Ubuntu from within Windows (assuming it's possible).
Would this method even work? This is the first machine I've ever done work on that has not allowed me to boot from CD, so I'm hoping there is an easier method than what I'm planning on trying.
I went into the BIOS, but there is a master password, not allowing any changes to the BIOS (including not allowing me to change the first boot device to CD/DVD drive). Dell is willing to provide us with the "password unique to the machine" for $75 since the computer is out of warranty (by 6+ years).
I was thinking of putting the hard drive in another laptop formatting, and loading WindowsXP (all the files until it does the first complete restart),and then putting it back in the Dell laptop. I would then load Ubuntu from within Windows (assuming it's possible).
Would this method even work? This is the first machine I've ever done work on that has not allowed me to boot from CD, so I'm hoping there is an easier method than what I'm planning on trying.