[Coolerman]

Just got a ti800 powerbook from Gov. Surplus it has a test version of 10.4 Tiger on it and is password protected. The question is this the machine refuses to boot off the cdrom/dvd drive Holding down the C key does not work. I would like to reset the password or reload 10.3.7 on this machine but it wont boot off C

[vmarks]

This can be two things:

1) the CD is busted.

Or

2) It's secured.

Gov surplus may mean that it was secured in accordance with the NSA guidelines.

http://www.nsa.gov/snac/os/applemac/...inal_v_1_1.pdf

In which case, it's been set to prevent booting from devices other than the hard drive.

See if you can't reset it's nvram and then boot in target firewire mode and connect to another computer as a hard drive and format it in either disk utility or even in windows- you don't care how it's formatted as long as it is.

You should also read this if they have secured open firmware, which I suspect they have: http://nemug.ath.cx/index.php?option...&Itemid=40