Good old BIOS times...
Posted on July 8, 2006 under Random Rants.
I miss the good old times of computers where you could simply pull out the battery off the mainboard to reset a BIOS password. But no these days if you forget your bios password you might as well buy a new computer, and this is especially true for laptops!
So... yes, in case you were asking, I lost the admin bios password on a laptop, and yes the laptop is set-up to boot from the internal harddisk directly, which is also the only internal storage device, everything else is USB connected.
So I set upon the task of reseting that stupid BIOS. Booting off a removable device is out of the question, so i tried the armada of programs available out there that crack the password, corrupt the BIOS forcing it to restore factory defaults and then some only to fail miserably. Since the passowrds are stored in NVRAM would be pretty pointless to take out the battery if there is one at all. And i am not going to get a new bios chip and / or try short circuiting connections on the motherboard to try a hard reset... Utterly dissapointed i finally caved in accepted the fact that I cannot reset that BIOS password, but decided to reinstall the os anyway. So I pulled the harddrive out, plugged it to another comp, installed a nice boot manager to a small primary partition, of the variety that sits on the harddisk and boots all possible devices. Then I plugged the harddrive back into the original laptop started it and hoped the boot manager would do it`s job and boot the installation cd located in an external USB drive. Which it politely refused... so i`m stuck...
So... yes, in case you were asking, I lost the admin bios password on a laptop, and yes the laptop is set-up to boot from the internal harddisk directly, which is also the only internal storage device, everything else is USB connected.
So I set upon the task of reseting that stupid BIOS. Booting off a removable device is out of the question, so i tried the armada of programs available out there that crack the password, corrupt the BIOS forcing it to restore factory defaults and then some only to fail miserably. Since the passowrds are stored in NVRAM would be pretty pointless to take out the battery if there is one at all. And i am not going to get a new bios chip and / or try short circuiting connections on the motherboard to try a hard reset... Utterly dissapointed i finally caved in accepted the fact that I cannot reset that BIOS password, but decided to reinstall the os anyway. So I pulled the harddrive out, plugged it to another comp, installed a nice boot manager to a small primary partition, of the variety that sits on the harddisk and boots all possible devices. Then I plugged the harddrive back into the original laptop started it and hoped the boot manager would do it`s job and boot the installation cd located in an external USB drive. Which it politely refused... so i`m stuck...