i8600 Splash screen and What does System Primary password do to the hard drive?

Hi everyone,

I've attempted to look up a few things for the Inspiron 8600 A08 BIOS on Google, Inspiron 8600 forums, and through searching through the Dell forums. I haven't been able to figure out how to tell the Search function to search through ONLY specific forums (and not the entire Dell Community forums) -- if you know, please let me know :)

Here are what I've been trying to research:

1. Is there a way to disable the Dell Splash screen that appears at boot-up? I have seen Dell documents (through the searches) that show you how to do that with other Inspiron and Latitude laptops, but haven't been successful with i8600. Namely, I'd like to see the normal BIOS screen's POST process you normally see on desktop computers. From what I've read, newer laptops are now using Dell's proprietary Dell BIOS?

2. Is there a way to replace the Dell Splash screen with your own logo? This would allow you, for example, to also place your ownership information onto the logo (no need to modify the Asset tag, which is what I'd prefer.) Better yet, if the replacement would allow you to make an animated splash screen with sound like on my older Sony laptop, that would be great! Someone on another forum said that you can find the documentation at support.dell.com, but after searching through the Dell sites, I've concluded that my assumption was correct: Why would Dell endorse the changing of its own splash screen and thus remove Dell's name/ marketing opportunity?

3. What exactly does enabling the System Primary password (which is used for the hard drive) do to the hard drive? My guess is that it does NOTHING to the hard drive itself, but instead is used to tell the BIOS whether to mount the hard drive or not. Giving a false password would tell the laptop to not enable the hard drive. Is that correct? If that's correct, then the hard drive actually isn't really protected then because somebody could still simply unscrew the hard drive module, remove the drive, and use it and/or extract its information on another computer. If the System Primary password indeed does modify the hard drive, what exactly does it do? If it modifies the boot sector, what if a virus corrupts it? How would one then be able to access the hard drive? I see many potential issues if System Primary does modify the drive.

Thank you for any help you can provide me.

Michael

Message Edited by hksscom on 06-18-2004 04:52 AM