Override bios based PW?

Ok my friend has an old AT&T comptuer that technically belongs to AT&T still but his dad has had it for years and he was transfered to another company. Its an old socket 4 system on an AT form factor, the bios PW is enabled and you cant start with out it, also it seems to have forgotten the keyboards drivers so they cant even guess at the diffent combos as the keyboard wont work. I looked for a jumper to kill the cmos but couldnt find one, i couldnt find a batter to take out while the power is unpluged either. I did google searches on the sparce numbers on the mobo itself and found nothing. I belive its made by Foxconn as the top most ISA slot on the daughter board is labled Foxconn, and its somewhere else on the daughterboard or mobo. The chip is a pentium, pre MMX i belive, its not that important as the comp is pretty darn old, but it would still be nice to make it work. Any ideas on how to kill the cmos? I dont have the comp with me at the moment (back at the friends house) so i cant answer any detailed Qs.

Um, I don't think it needs drivers to be able to interpret data from the keyboard. Tried another keyboard?

And when you get a chance, see who made the BIOS. There's all sorts of default passwords for each type.

Look on the board for a battery, and remove it for a few minutes. Do this with the power cord unplugged, and the CMOS shoudl clear on it's own. Old mobos sometimes did not use the coin-cell batteries common today, so you might have to search a bit before you find it.

If you find it- look near it for two blank, shiny contact points. Some old boards require you to physically short two points in order to clear a CMOS, rather than just move a jumper. Shorting the points may be easier than removing the battery- sometimes thay are permanently soldered in place.

As PerfectCore said, keyboards do not require drivers. Not during the boot loader, anyway. The keyboard is either dead, plugged into the wrong hole, or has been disabled in the BIOS.

There has to be a battery somewhere. I've seen a couple of old boards that used AA batteries.

i looked everywhere, even under the PSU and the daughter board, i cant find one, and my friend knows nothing about computers but assumes since he watched (and assisted me a bit) in the taking appart of his old pre-mmx pentium machines (one socket 4 other one socket 7) that he knows what hes doing. He just broke the bezel on his compaq when i wasnt there by the way, lol. Ok but pretty much what im saying is that if i couldnt find the battery he never will. I looked for both the stand alone black-box type and the disk type, i looked all over for the black box thing, notta.

You could give these methods a shot.

http://www.elfqrin.com/docs/biospw.html

Do you have a digital camera? Take a picture and post a PIC on here. Maybe we can help you find it.

BTW, for what it's worth, here's the specs on that socket.

Intel Socket 4 Specification

Designation: Socket 4

Number of Pins: 273

Pin Rows: 4

Voltage: 5 volts

Motherboard Class: 1st Generation Pentium

Supported Processors: Pentium 60-66, Pentium OverDrive

Description: Socket 4 was the first socket designed for native support of the early Pentium processors, running at 60 or 66 MHz. It is the only 5 volt Pentium socket. These machines had no real upgrade path to the faster versions of the Pentium because starting with the 75 MHz version, Intel switched to 3.3 volt power. This socket does support a special Pentium OverDrive, running at 120 MHz (for the 60 MHz) or 133 MHz (for the 66).

http://www.labmice.net/articles/BIOS_hack.htm

Has a decent list of BIOS backdoor passwords, they usually work on the older BIOSes, just check and see if it's an Award, AMI, Phoenix BIOS, etc.

a lot of P1 boards had the battery soldered on. Look for something about 1/2 the length of a AA battery, but same thinknes. Most of the one's I've seen were covered in yellow heat shrink.

Careful tho....if you decide to cut the lead, then resolder it, batteries don't take kindly to heat and can explode.

A lot of them were inside a little plastic cage too. But yeah, it's about the same thickness and half the length of a AA battery and often yellow.