Locked out of BIOS

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hey guys,

I bought a second hand laptop a few weeks ago and it turns out the BIOS is locked. I'm going to try Hirens in the morning but I saw that if you enter an incorrect password you can derive an unlock code from the error code it gives you. I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this so, does anybody know.. If I enter the password incorrectly 3 times, is there any chance it will lock down the laptop completely and not allow me to boot into an OS?

Cheers guys

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

No the system wont be disabled a reboot will boot the machine again . Use this site http://bios-pw.org/ to decrypt the backdoor password that should be shown after the 3 failed attempts. More info here also: http://dogber1.blogspot.com/2009/05/table-of-reverse-engineered-bios.html

 

Thanks Simon. I'll give that a crack when I get in later.

 

Only just gotten around to trying this as I need to change a setting.. there's no code after 3 failed attempts. Anyone got any other suggestions?

 

Remove the CMOS battery then insert it again.

Job done.

 

Modern laptops don't generally have either, as far as I'm aware. I only ever recall seeing a CMOS battery on a couple of old inspirons(2007 maybe) I stripped down a couple of months back. The CMOS info is generally on a dedicated EEPROM.

 

Use the Hiren's BootCD. It includes tools for removing or cracking the BIOS password. But this works only if the boot priority is set to use CD as the first boot media.

 

BootROM better