'on off' bios error message on 770 boot attempt.

[parangles]

Has anyone seen a bios screen on boot up with
just the words ON OFF and a circle and a bar symbol
beside the words ? There is no cursor and the keyboard
is dead. It has previously booted fine with the Linux DSL
on the hard drive. Booting with the CD is the same.
What does this mean?
Thanks,
Chris.

[GomJabbar]

I believe you have the power on password set. It may even be the supervisor password, but since I haven't used the supervisor password, I am not sure about the screen you see when it is set.

You need to enter the password to go further. You should be able to verify this by pressing keys and seeing asterisks appearing on the screen.

[parangles]

Thanks but its not that. All three passwords are unlocked.
I am going to check the cmos battery, although I ran all the diagnostic tests and everything passed OK.

[tfflivemb2]

I know that I would get that same symptom when I knew that I was working with a dead CMOS on a TP600E, after I would correctly set the time.

I was able to bypass it by turning the switch off and then on right away.

[pkiff]

I think I've seen this error on a 770E or a 770Z when I was doing some hardware changes / hard drive changes on a docking station. In my case, the screen went away when I turned off the machine, pulled out the hard drive or whatever I had just inserted, and then rebooted. Or maybe it went away just by rebooting...I can't quite recall.

In any case, I think this screen indicates some kind of low-level BIOS conflict. I wonder if it comes from having some kind of record in your BIOS or boot sector about your last successful boot config and then trying to boot with a different OS or different config without allowing the machine a chance to reconfigure? In my case, these screens were definitely not related to passwords or to CMOS or other batteries.

Not much help, but maybe gives you some ideas?

Phil.

[parangles]

I changed the cmos battery and it booted OK.
Whether it will do so again, who knows.

" trying to boot with a different OS or different config "
It may have been that- I had loaded the OS and was (accidently) booting with a live OS CD. Maybe it got confused.
I will also check to see if the bios could do with an upgrade.
Thanks to all.
Chris