I found an Acer Aspire 5100 in the dumpster. I would like to wipe the hard drive and start fresh. HOWEVER, the optical drive is not selectable to boot from (as if it is not being recognized). I read somewhere else that this is a known issue with the Aspire 5100 and that it is usally fixed by updating the bios. HOWEVER, there is a password on the vista administrator account, so I can't log in to do this.
This is what I've tried so far:
1. moving the hard drive to another computer with a working CD-ROM and using NT offline password tool to remove the password. This method does not find the registry files.
2. installing another hard drive with another installation of windows, which will only boot to safe mode because it was installed on another computer. WinPhlash (the bios updater) will not work in safe mode.
The F12 boot menu only gives these two options:
SATA : Hitachi HTS . . . . (hard drive)
PCI BEV: Realtek Boot Agent
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to work around this?
This is what I've tried so far:
1. moving the hard drive to another computer with a working CD-ROM and using NT offline password tool to remove the password. This method does not find the registry files.
2. installing another hard drive with another installation of windows, which will only boot to safe mode because it was installed on another computer. WinPhlash (the bios updater) will not work in safe mode.
The F12 boot menu only gives these two options:
SATA : Hitachi HTS . . . . (hard drive)
PCI BEV: Realtek Boot Agent
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to work around this?
