Ideas in creating a password system

Does anyone have any ideas how you could create a password system that locks the computer if a password is typed incorrectly etc. It would be good if the program could load before the OS.

What type of header files would be needed, etc. Thanks

My guess is you'd need some Assembly to do this, although I may be wrong. A simple batch file run on startup could also do this..

I remember a friend doing something similar, the screen would just go blank until you entered the password. This is especially useful as people who boot up your computer wouldn't even know what was going on. '0' would clear the password buffer, and the computer would restart if the wrong password was entered.

Also, you must disable booting from floppy in your BIOS, and put a password on it to prevent someone from changing this.

Of course, theres no foolproof way, as someone could easliy open up your box and reset the BIOS password if they knew what jumper is was.

Or, alternatively, you could try scramming the boot files on your HD and forcing a floppy load, using some kind of nonstandard partitioning that a generic boot disc is unlikely to cope with. Then keep your boot disc in your footlocker/under your mattress wherever. Of course this leaves you up the creek w/o a paddle if your boot disc gets corrupted.

That might not hold an expert back for long, but will keep family members/coworkers from tinkering.

Preety good ideas. You could have another batch file stored in your system where the name of that file could be the password, etc.

Couldn't you also change your autoexec file to run your .exe file before windows starts and then have your program shut the computer down if they don't enter the correct pw? (The problem is I don't know how to shut down the computer like that, and also someone could get into dos mode and fix your autoexec...). So if this is for fun that's secure enough.

well, my first impression was you wanted to pw protect your program and have it screw up their comuter if they tried to guess it, and that sounds a lil too evil, do't do that. but if you simply want to pw protect your computer, get some screen saver that has a pw lock and have it run at startup, or look at www.download.com for an os lock

Screw up the computer by locking it up? Ummm it's just annoying, all you'd have to do is reboot. If you wanted to screw it up, theres many ways that are more malicious as well as easier to do than this.

in the bios setup there is an option which allows you to prompt for password everytime the computer boots.

plus as said before you can disable boot from other drives and also you could disable the F5 and F8 switches which let you enter in safe mode bypassing the autoexec.bat and other files.