Technical Support Question

perryh at pluto.rain.com perryh at pluto.rain.com
Fri Feb 17 09:33:22 UTC 2012


Chip Oakley <silverskymusic2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Am tempted to remove the drive and insert a new one, not sure as
> there is memory on the drive available and nothing really wrong
> with it.

If you don't mind losing everything currently on the drive,
overwriting the MBR -- and the backup GPT at the end of the drive,
if the BIOS supports GPT/UEFI -- would surely keep it from booting
into Windows.  You'd probably have to take the drive out, and
connect it to a different machine (since this one's BIOS seems
hardwired to boot only from the hard drive).

Another possibility would be to clear the machine's CMOS, if there's
a way to do that.  Desktop mainboards usually have a jumper for the
purpose; dunno about Samsung laptops but removing the CMOS battery
and giving it a few minutes for the stray capacitance to discharge
should suffice.  (Getting to the CMOS battery may involve taking the
case apart.)


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