SO, helping out a friend and his laptop- it's got a BIOS password that just doesn't want to be removed. It's a Phoenix BIOS. Tried removing CMOS power. Nothing (tried for a 1 week discharge) Tried using Hiren's boot CD- nothing, because the password prompt is BEFORE accesing the BIOS or the boot menu. Tried using backdoor passwords, nothing at all worked. Any other suggestions? :mad-new:
I remember about a year ago someone had the same problem, it was a Toshiba Satellite Pro and the hard drive was locked as soon as you boot up. They didn't know how it got like that and unfortunately after digging around for an answer it seemed there was no way around it according to official Toshiba documentation. Essentially they had to buy a new hard drive and reinstall everything.
On some old Dell models you could clear the password by shorting two points on the board with a paperclip, it also cleared all serial numbers/service tags and such but it worked!
Sounds rather iffy if he doesn't know his own password. I'd steer clear. I remember some Dells going into a security mode if they thought they'd possibly been stolen and you'd have to contact Dell to get the password.
No,, having an easy to reset method for laptops defies the point of having a password. Toshibas are a pain in the ass since they removed the parallel port.
Dump the board eeprom, I remember a few years back there was a article that said that most manufactures dont bother encrypting the password on the eeprom, so its viewable as plain text ansii.
Thats changed quite a lot recently. But its certainly worth a shot before trashing it. You might also be able to buy a replacement bios chip off ebay without a password (you cant just edit some, as they have a checksum check on the contains). - the 8460p as an example. But, looking at ebay - it seems the password generator works for this model. So the link above should do it.
Nice to hear they wised up a bit You can allso use a arduino emulating a USB keyboard and brute force it, mind you that could take a very very long time, but its worth a shot,if you cant find anything on ebay. Allso try phoning the manufacturer who will request you send them the laptop and they will remove it for a fee. PS what make+model is it might help a bit if we knew, allso hope your friend got the system legitimately.
He posted the make and model above. You also cant brute force them that easily - you get 3 attempts and have to power off/on. You could rig something up though I guess to power cycle it.
Resseting isnt that difficult, your using a arduino so just pull the power switch low when needed, like I said it will take a long time ,but do-able
Have you tried this? Bare in mind that it will only remove the bios password and not a hard drive lock.
Couldn't you just yank the hard drive out and put it in an enclosure then use "take ownership" on the drive and then you could access the files.
