Prevent booting from from alternate devices.

[Chops McGandhi]

Hi,
1st the problem then my set up.
Like I said, I'm trying to prevent booting from any other device except the hard drive.
Now in the bios, there is a boot order list, with all the types of devices and I can exclude devices from that list and it seems to work for a little bit. But let's say that I tried to exclude usb booting. I might come back later and try to boot with usb and it works! So then I go into the bios and sure enough usb is back in the boot list. It almost feels like, it treats it as a new device, so it gets added to the boot list but that's just a guess.
Any ideas?
My motherboard is made by Phoenix. Not sure what the model number is--CPU-z says it's "KHLB2" and says the bios version number is 1.07.
The computer is a laptop made by ibuypower. The model is the battalion 101 cz-10 ultra. And I'm running windows 7 pro 64 bit on it. I bought the laptop new in 2010

 

[philipma1957]

Hi,
1st the problem then my set up.
Like I said, I'm trying to prevent booting from any other device except the hard drive.
Now in the bios, there is a boot order list, with all the types of devices and I can exclude devices from that list and it seems to work for a little bit. But let's say that I tried to exclude usb booting. I might come back later and try to boot with usb and it works! So then I go into the bios and sure enough usb is back in the boot list. It almost feels like, it treats it as a new device, so it gets added to the boot list but that's just a guess.
Any ideas?
My motherboard is made by Phoenix. Not sure what the model number is--CPU-z says it's "KHLB2" and says the bios version number is 1.07.
The computer is a laptop made by ibuypower. The model is the battalion 101 cz-10 ultra. And I'm running windows 7 pro 64 bit on it. I bought the laptop new in 2010

While an interesting question.

I would guess a custom oem mobo or custom bios for the mobo.

Think of it from the laptop companies viewpoint.

If you lock out all possible boot choices, but the hdd and the hdd fails you would want to return it for repair(if in warranty). My guess is that putting in the usb and letting it override your settings was done on purpose to aid restore in a case of a crashed hdd.

 

[Chops McGandhi]

While an interesting question.

I would guess a custom oem mobo or custom bios for the mobo.

Think of it from the laptop companies viewpoint.

If you lock out all possible boot choices, but the hdd and the hdd fails you would want to return it for repair(if in warranty). My guess is that putting in the usb and letting it override your settings was done on purpose to aid restore in a case of a crashed hdd.

I see what you're saying and you could easily be right but if you needed to boot from something else, you could just add that device to the boot menu and if the bios is locked? well in that case it produces an error code that can be used to generate a backdoor password.

Also my description of the problem was just the way it seemed to me. I have no idea if the bios purposefully overriding the boot list is what is actually going on.
Thanks for the reply!

 

[bwanaaa]

my intel motherboard prevents the boot choice list if i set the bios password.

go into your bios and look for the section on security.
intel motherboards have two levels - administrator and user.

enter something as the admin password.

reboot.

now any attempt at accessing the bios or bringing up the boot list is met by a screen requesting the password.

of course, make sure your hard drive is the first and only boot device in the bios, too.

 

[lakedude]

Why do you want to do this? Are you trying to keep someone out or fix a problem?

You can not keep someone out if they have physical access and are smart enough...

 

[Chops McGandhi]

my intel motherboard prevents the boot choice list if i set the bios password.

go into your bios and look for the section on security.
intel motherboards have two levels - administrator and user.

enter something as the admin password.

reboot.

now any attempt at accessing the bios or bringing up the boot list is met by a screen requesting the password.

of course, make sure your hard drive is the first and only boot device in the bios, too.

My motherboard does not require a password to see the boot menu, only to change boot settings and other bios settings