can not boot to other device

Well...heh...Norton DiskLock prevents booting from other devices BECAUSE its a security program and is designed to prevent folks from doing what youre doing to get at your precious data. It wouldnt be much of a security program if people could just boot off a floppy to get around it. You are going to have to either figure out the PW or call Norton for the master password. You dont have many choices and none of them are very pleasant...this is why most folks dont use that type of security.

the word from power on tech support (power on now bought disklock and now provides the support)is there is no master password and the only thing to do is format the hard drive. what you are suggesting makes no sense. what you are saying is that if you don't have the password you have to get a new hard drive? that's ridiculous. supposedly, by default all macs hit the floppy first, then hit the hard drive. what i'm saying is that my system is hitting the hard drive first. how do i make it hit the floppy or cd first. all the research i've done says to hit command-shift-option-delete on start but it doesn't work. i also tried command-shift-option-delete-scsi ID of CD. nothing seems to work.

You do not have to get a new HD as that would be rediculous. You just need to get past the password. The way disklock works is this: it puts information on your HD that is read into rom at startup. The rom controlls basic functions of your computer like its boot process. A CD contains rom as well but disklock (when its drivers are loaded from the HD at startup) blocks the CDrom from using its rom. Thus preventing people from getting around the password. What you MIGHT be able to do is this: disconnect the power supply from the HD thus preventing it from loading its ROM at startup. Then after the boot process is done and youre in the finder, reconnect the power supply and reformat it with a drive utility. Note that you will not be able to MOUNT the drive before formatting. Also note that you may have to zap the pram (command-opt-p-r until you hear three startup chimes pre-smileymac) before your mac will boot off the CD/floppy.

this is a 280c laptop in a docking station. i don't think that would work. my main question is. isn't there a way to boot directly to the floppy or cd? command-shift-option-delete doesn't seem to want to work

Yes you can boot to a floppy but not when you have disklock installed. Your solutions have been provided but if you dont think theyll work thats your call...I would suggest at least trying them before eliminating them though.

Of course there is another way to get a mac to start from the cd...

I always thought on genuine Apple systems, you could boot to CD simply by holding down the C key.  I know it doesn't work this way on clones, maybe not on external CDs.  Another option, if you just need to format the drive, would be to use the Duo in SCSI disk mode, but this requires another Mac, and a specific SCSI cable.  This allow you to essentially use your Duo as an external HD on another system.