Hope this makes sense!! Recently a friend purchased a GX280 Dell. When he recieved it it had a bios password but no boot password. As the bios was locked I had no access to boot sequence etc (Locked in F12 as well). I took the sata hard drive out and reformatted it and reinstalled a clean copy of windows xp pro in my own dell machine. In the mean time i managed to remove the admin password I thought i would be able to just plug the HD back into the original machine and hey presto windows xp!. However now when it boots up it will come up with a screen asking to pick a OS which it was doing before I formatted the HD, there is only 1 option available so i choose it (Or let it auto select) the windows xp screen starts to load with the bar then suddenly just restarts the whole machine, this process would just loop if left. I thought maybe try running the windows xp cd again, and although i even deselected it from the boot sequence it always wants to boot from the sata hard drive rather than any other option i prioritise in the boot sequence. The only way I can successfully get it to boot from cd is to disable the sata drive in the bios but then I have no hard drive when it comes to the windows setup. I am completely stumped now hopefully someone can help!.
What you can try is to first unplug the SATA drive from the machine (just unplug it, don't take it out of the machine), then reset the BIOS via the motherboard jumper (usually JP1) and then power on the computer and set the boot order. Then power off the machine and reconnect the SATA drive and turn the beast back on. See what happens.
Hmm same result bro the machine still boots from the hd, I noticed that when trying to access safe mode it was restarting at a file called mup.sys if this is any help.
