lbr@holos0.uucp (Len Reed) (08/16/89)
In article <1989Aug15.183532.27998@ee.rochester.edu> jal@ee.rochester.edu writes: >A friend of mine wants to write a program that would provide some >small security by either preventing people from booting off a >floppy drive or by making the information on the hard-drive unusable >if the system is booted off the floppy. > >This is for DOS and cannot involve significant hardware (like >burning ROMS, cutting wires, etc). Any thoughts would be appreciated. I have a similar question. How can one reorder the sequence of disk searches during bootup? I worked on a semi-AT-clone that had the boot device in the CMOS RAM. You could tell it to go to the hard disk and it would ignore the floppy. If you had a problem you hit ESC during bootup and it booted the floppy. Why would you want this? Running DOS it's only an aggravation when the system tries to boot the unbootable diskette you left in the drive. Under Xenix, though, we get a middle of the night power failure when someone's left a diskette in the drive and the system is unusable (no dial in) until someone actually goes to the office. (Without the diskette the system reboots completely.) Surely the only way to fix this is to burn new BIOS PROMS. I have access to the equipment to do this. Do I have to buy the BIOS, though, or is this something that can be easily found by disassembly? Anyone done this? (I've got an AST 386-20 with Phoenix BIOS.) I've added comp.unix.xenix to comp.sys.ibm.pc, and have directed followups to Xenix. -- Len Reed Holos Software, Inc. Voice: (404) 496-1358 UUCP: ...!gatech!holos0!lbr