IBM ThinkPad G40 - Locked BIOS/Hard Drive

[Zoom7000]

We had a load of IBM ThinkPads that were put in before I started, and they were very heavily vandalised and totally messed about with.

Some of the laptops had BIOS passwords put on and some had a password put on the hard drive so I am locked out of even booting into Windows.

Is there anyway I can unlock the BIOS password on the machine? Last time I called IBM, they wanted to charge us near enough £300 or so per locked BIOS/Hard Drive! 8O

[OutToLunch]

BIOS password I've had success with, haven't come across any password protected HD's yet - the last laptop I came across that I was locked out of like this, I had to remove the HD to force it to skip to CD booting (since I couldn't get in to change the boot order) and burn a copy of a nifty little tool which reset the CMOS and zapped the password. Didn't find anything to successfully recover the password. Sods law, it was the last tool out of about 20 I tried! I'll have a look and let you know which one it was... May do the job, may cause things to explode. Either way it'll be interesting!

[Geoff]

I use this to crack bios passwords.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/CmosPwd

[Zoom7000]

Can't get it to boot even into the floppy :S

You might be able to use a backdoor password, that the bios manufacture set. Check this link

http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/reference/biosp.htm

or if it’s a old laptop it may have a bios battery which you could take out to reset the bios.

[bazuk]

Hi all
I used to repair ibm thinkpads and the new generation from say 2003 onwards cannot be unlocked, we used to have some of them come in to the workshop and basically we had to replace the motherboards with unlocked ones and send the locked ones back to ibm for them to replace the flash roms.

regards baz