HI-GRADE laptop password reset?

[bishopsgarthstockton]

Hi

Does anyone know the BIOS password for HI-GRADE laptops, just had one given to me for repair and i need to access the BIOS. I cant use a bios password cracker due to not able to access Operating system.

cheers

[Geoff]

Yank the battery?

[webman]

This any good?

[bishopsgarthstockton]

Yanking the battery is no good, it has a security chip.. tried all the manufacturer default passwords. Trying to get through to HI-GRADE but i've been stuck on hold for 10 minutes. such a stupid problem that will only take 2 minutes to sort out and its taking for ever.

[Geoff]

swap the hard drive with one that has an OS on that you can access? then use a bios cracker?

[plexer]

Have you tried pulling the hard drive out slightly so it's disconnected.

If you can now get into the bios you can blank the password.

While still in the bios with the machine powered up push the drive back in.

Now redetect hard drive in the bios and remove and hard drive password that may have been set.

Ben

[bishopsgarthstockton]

somebody has been tinkering with the laptop. the hard drive was out to start with and the bios is trying to find an OS using the LAN card. only way to sort it out is to get in the BIOS and change the config settings. think i will try HI-GRADE one more time before i do a hulk hogan body slam on it

[bishopsgarthstockton]

swap the hard drive with one that has an OS on that you can access? then use a bios cracker?

after doing some reading, I've found out it has a security chip buit on the board. password cracker would not be able to do much.

I have tried a diffrent hard drive, just to see if the one that was in is dead.

[bishopsgarthstockton]

Crap... the manufacture HI-GRADE dont set passwords. apparently it does not have a security chip. just gonna let it sit there for couple of hours and have a go then.

[kerrymoralee9280]

If you need an operating system why not boot into a live copy of Windows 98?

You can download it (i.e. from http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/), burn it to disk and boot into a familar windows environment. Then you should be able to run the BIOS cracker

[bishopsgarthstockton]

I would but i cant boot to a floppy nor cd or hdd. nightmare

some one has been in the bios and bodged it right up.

[kerrymoralee9280]

Oh right, my bad

[mrtechsystems]

@ Bishop

If you do solve this I would like to know I got 2 Laptops ACER and TOshiba and can not get passed them yet unless I send them off you talking about 100 to get it removed

[bishopsgarthstockton]

Just remove both the external power/battery, and bios battey, for about 4-5 hours. that should clear it for you.

[srochford]

This kind of thing is a real pain. The manufacturers have tried to make their laptops much more secure - the idea is that if the machine gets stolen it will be completely useless if you've set a startup password on it. The trouble is when a password gets set that shouldn't be set and the machine hasn't been stolen; the manufacturer won't just give out a routine for resetting it (how do they know you haven't just stolen it?)

We've had a few Toshiba Portege tablets get passwords set. The first one I just thought it was someone being dozy; since then, however, I've found several web references suggesting that there's a bug in the BIOS which causes a random password to be set occasionally. I can't find anything official on this but it would be good to know if this is true - I can then bring pressure on the supplier to repair it as a manufacturing fault.