🚀 go-pugleaf

singer@uwovax.uwo.ca writes:

>This seems like an unsophisticated question to pose in such a group, but can
>anybody recommend a password programme that operates on startup? Recently,
>somebody got into the computer of a librarian who works with my wife at a
>hospital and reformatted the hard drive. The computer cannot be locked up. I
>purchased PC-Tools 7.1 upon the dealer's assurance that it had that
>capability--of a password at sign on that keeps the hard drive locked--and
>found out that it has different password capabilities (specific subdirectories)
>but not the larger one. I look forward to hearing...-- 

Unless the BIOS has support for such, it is not *possible* to do what you
wish using "standard" MS-DOS. The problem is that all anybody has to do is
insert a floppy and boot off of *that*. Instant bypass of all your protection.

DR-DOS gets around this by doing odd things to the disk format and partition
info. This may cause problems with some utilities. 

Recent BIOSes have options such as letting you not allow booting from
floppy. Others have a "power-on password" option. Being in the hardware
these can't be bypassed without opening the computer. If possible, I'd
recomend getting a machine with this sort of BIOS (recent Compaq's have
both, recent AMI BIOSes have the "don't boot from floppy" option, some
Tandy's have the "don't boot from floppy" option as well as a "boot from
ROM copy of DOS" option.)

-- 
Leonard Erickson		      leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com
CIS: [70465,203]			 70465.203@compuserve.com
FIDO:   1:105/56	 Leonard.Erickson@f56.n105.z1.fidonet.org
(The CIS address is checked daily. The others infrequently)