Fujitsu Siemens equipment!

[isdky]

Our school has been buying and using fujitsu siemens laptops for the past 3 years, and have recently purchased 40 Amilo Pro V2085's which are good cheap laptops for the staff to use - however our older laptops (V2000) have since been passed down the line and setup for the students to use where a dedicated suit isnt practical (e.g Science department, where computers are needed but we have nowhere to put them); so they have been using these V2000's for 3 months now without a problem until recently when a kid managed to change the bios password and set it so the password is required before the OS will boot meaning we can't get into the laptop bios to change the password or into the OS to use a bios password reset tool - we are totally stumped with this one - removing the bios battery and the main battery does nothing, the password is stored in the eprom as far as we know
So - we phoned fujitsu assuming they code just generate/give us the master password that it asks for when you get the bios password 3 times wrong.... but NO, they want us to send the laptop to them at a cost of £117 so they can "Have a look", they bluntly refuse to give us a password or any real assistance and wont let us speak to someone higher - whats worse is, we needed to get some work of the hard disk so we swapped it into a known good manchine and now that laptop also asks for the password, putting its original hard disk back in and it still asks!
Now we have two laptops asking for a Master Password and no help from Fujitsu and there is no way the school will be paying £117 per laptop just for a password.
If your going to use Fujitsu kit, make sure you have a secure password on your bios and make sure one is set! - Needless to say our school will no longer be dealing with Fujitsu equipment as their support team and surface are way below standard.

Rant over I guess, if anyone has had the same problems it'd be good to hear we are not the only ones suffering the wrath of Fujitsu's money spinning IT business - or if someone has the 'Magic' master password?

Thanks, Brian Barnett

(ICT Technician - Saddleworth School, Oldham)

[plexer]

What happens if you boot a machine with the hard drive pulled out can you get into the bios?

If so try this.

Slide hard drive out.
Boot machine and enter bios.
Go into password section and set password to blank.
Push hard drive back in while still in bios.
Detect hard drives in bios.
Save settings and exit.

Ben

[isdky]

The bios passwords on both machines are locked - when you enter the bios is immediately asks for a password; no joy with no hard disk in either - the stangest thing we've ever come across. When you put the hard disk into an external USB caddy, Windows will detect the drive but wont mount, or acknowledge that the drive is readable (and cant even be formatted) - MacOSX gets astep further but refuses to mount the drive and designates its model as 'DUMMY' but correctly identifies the capacity.

So the recap - we now have 2 unuseable laptops, both with hard drives that some how infect other laptops of the same model; I'm reluctnat to try the hard drive in one of the new laptops as I don't want 3 useless one! lol

Thanks for your reply tho,

Brian.

[Geoff]

Yank the batteries. Both the main batteries and the on board cmos battery.

[plexer]

removing the bios battery and the main battery does nothing, the password is stored in the eprom as far as we know.

They tried that.

Ben

[Wizzer]

Sounds like a very odd situation.

Have you tried booting from a Linux live CD with the hard drive in a USB caddy? This might be of some help.

[Geoff]

Ok right sorry, if it's an eprom what is the code on the board. You usually just have to short out a couple of the 'legs' on the chip to erase it.

[djm968]

With Siemens Fujitsu laptops you can set a hard-disk password, I suspect this is what has happened.

Fujitsu calculate a default password using the HD and machine ID if you can produce proof of purchase and pay them X amount.

I remember seeing a post once about opening up the HDD and looking for a tiny jumper on the PCB but not sure if this was true.

The only other option is to throw the drives in a bin and buy new ones.

[mrforgetful]

Aren't the V2000 ones useless for anything other than Windows 98 anyway? Bin em!

[isdky]

Ok right sorry, if it's an eprom what is the code on the board. You usually just have to short out a couple of the 'legs' on the chip to erase it.

The BIOS eprom chip is an SST 49LF004A - I read through the 36 page pdf on this particular chip and can't figure out which pin combination would erase it?

Have you tried booting from a Linux live CD with the hard drive in a USB caddy? This might be of some help.

Unfortunately theres no way of getting to the boot stage as that is what you would get after the correct password has been entered.

With Siemens Fujitsu laptops you can set a hard-disk password, I suspect this is what has happened.

Fujitsu calculate a default password using the HD and machine ID if you can produce proof of purchase and pay them X amount.

I remember seeing a post once about opening up the HDD and looking for a tiny jumper on the PCB but not sure if this was true.

The only other option is to throw the drives in a bin and buy new ones.

Its more than just the hard drives - its the bios password on the laptops that is my main problem as hard disks can be purchased quite cheaply and I have some spare 2.5inch drives if they are beyond repair. I can't really afford to be throwing laptops away though!

Aren't the V2000 ones useless for anything other than Windows 98 anyway? Bin em!

lol !! - They arn't bad machines, they have 1.4 - 1.7Ghz Centrino CPU's, 40Gb hard drives and 512Mb RAM - a little excessive for Win98 but Xp is ok on them.


Thanks guys, Brian

[mrforgetful]

lol !! - They arn't bad machines, they have 1.4 - 1.7Ghz Centrino CPU's, 40Gb hard drives and 512Mb RAM - a little excessive for Win98 but Xp is ok on them.


Thanks guys, Brian

Ah I was thinking of the Lifebook C Series, dunno why! lol

[petectid]

Some techniques and cracks available here

Though it does say try at your own risk

[djm968]

I am writing this on my Amilo workhorse, never bothered before but I might just enable the BIOS and HDD. If its that hard to crack and it gets stolen I will be safe in the knowledge that some tea leaf is googling away like mad trying to bypass it!

[HodgeHi]

Have i got this right in my mind?

The hdd is locked by a password which is resulting in it not being allowed to boot?

If this is correct then "possibly" you may be able to use the trick that the xbox uses to unlock its hdd.

There is a tool that is used to check the state of hdds which can be downloaded.

The best place to look for this to find out if its possible is xbox-scene. You may need a firmware for the laptop as well. The tool is part of a bootable cd that is called hdutil.

Maybe of some help, but it is somewhat of a long shot.

I have never tried unlocking any other drive in this way.

[chrbb]

Send the bill to the little darling's parents/carer, if you know who it is, that is.
I know that doesn't solve the fujitsu' 'lets stitch the customer up' situation, it might also be worth while letting fujitsu know how many of their laptops you have bought off them and that you may use dell or whoever for that large order of equipment you are currently putting together.