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Question

inspiron 6400 media direct

May 31, 2013 3:09AM PDT

I've just bought a used 6400 without the hard drive and
when I put the new drive in the computer wont go past the media direct screen and it keeps asking for a password in mcafee. I've tried everything to get into bios,including taking out the battery to clear the cmos and yet it still appears.
two questions,where is mcafee being held seeing as the hd is blank and specially with clearing cmos.
secondly,how do I clear this off so that I can install windows.hoping someone can help.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Sounds right.
May 31, 2013 3:18AM PDT

The new drive appears to have something on it. I've yet to see McAfee in the bios so it must be on the drive.

Why not set the BIOS to boot from CD/DVD and then insert your Microsoft issued or other working bootable CD/DVD?
Bob

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sorry
May 31, 2013 6:54AM PDT

the drive has nothing on it,I still get mcafee with no drive in !! also,the only time I can get into either the bios or boot menu Is without a drive in,so if I boot off the windows cd it won't install cos it can't find the drive.
it's a bit of a catch 22 situation.If I turn on without the hard drive in I get the media direct screen and a line above
saying booting mcafee,then it goes to the mcafee login screen and that's as far as I can get.
still floundering around trying different things.

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Good to know.
Jun 2, 2013 2:07AM PDT

I've yet to find McAfee in any BIOS to date. My bet is still the drive or some other media has this. Let's hope Dell can answer this one here.

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.shtml covers this partition and if this was my PC I would be booting GPARTED to look at this drive.
Bob

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Curosity got me again !
Jun 2, 2013 2:32AM PDT

Would it make any sense for the op to run a live disc ? Would this tell us anything? ...Digger Confused

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Yes it would
Jun 2, 2013 2:40AM PDT

If I had this PC I'd boot my handy dandy GPARTED live CD and make sure the drive had no partitions. If wanted I was a truly empty HDD.
Bob

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If the op
Jun 2, 2013 2:50AM PDT

were to slide a Puppy disc in without the HDD installed would he/she be able to find McAfee or clear passwords and than install the HDD?

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Sure.
Jun 2, 2013 3:05AM PDT

The last puppy linux I used had GPARTED so it could be used as well to get at the HDD info. But the answer is likely no since this would truly be a first to find McAfee embedded in some BIOS.
Bob

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Answer
My guess is power on password
Jun 2, 2013 2:42AM PDT

Are you sure you're not getting a power on password coming from the BIOS and confusing it for Mcafee? If not, it sounds like you could have a virus that has managed to get into your CMOS. These are fairly rare, but I had a neighbor who had one that gave us fits. Usually when you remove the CMOS battery, it takes a fair amount of time before the CMOS gets cleared, sometimes you need to leave the battery out overnight. Also there's usually a jumper on the motherboard that will clear the CMOS quickly that you could find if you download the maintenance guide from Dell's web site.
`
Good luck.

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think its cracked
Jun 2, 2013 7:52AM PDT

I managed somehow to get into the bios setup,checked all the password settings but none were set,so I set the bios to ignore all boot up passwords,and to boot from cd.after I was still getting the media direct screen but I managed to get the boot menu up,windows started to install until it couldn.t recognise the hard drive.at that point Iwas trying to install on a 320 gig standard drive,anyway managed to get back into bios and found it not recognised,so I tried with a little 64 gig ssd,same thing happed,so then I set it to install again with the drive just
pulled out enough to disengage triggered the install and as soon as it started running pushed the drive in and away
it went !! I then swapped over to the big drive and everything just went as normal,so really I still don't know what was the cause but at least it's up and running.
I acknowledge all the comments about Mcafee in bios etc,all I can say is what was happening,without either thehard drive or battery in it would boot first into media direct then then a few words over the direct screen would say "booting mcafee so and so,can't remember the rest,then a small screen would come up asking for a password.
so where the prog was coming from I don't know.many thanks to all who tried to help