Bios Password

[techdude25]

I work a a school and a student put a HDD/Bios Password on one of my laptops. As soon as you try and boot, i get prompted. It is a laptop with no jumpers on the Motherboard. I removed the CMOS battery, but all that did was have me reset the date and time. Password stayed in there. ANY help? Gateway told me to reformat. Would that work? Is there an easier way?

 

[SHAWN]

You will not be able to reformat because you cannot get past the POST. Call gateway again. They may have confused it to be an operating system PW

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

Well the reset should have cleared any bios password for BIOS, try resetting again.

Also, I think you may have mixed up BIOS password with a boot password. On some hard drives \ BIOS's you can like put a password to stop people from ascessing that drive.

Their is no way to clear those without taking out your data, you should be able to format it.

 

[SkyHi]

If you took the CMOS battery out, BIOS has no memory, it'll be reseted with new power. So I don't see how the BIOS password stayed. As DJ-CHRIS said, I think you may be confusing the BIOS password with the boot pass.

-SkyHi

 

[Inaris]

The HDD password is done throught a special control on the HD, through the bios, but not in the BIOS. You can't reset it. There is no way to get around it that I know of, at least for IBM's which is our primary use.
The vendor might have the control to get around it, but they ussually don't like to release that information to the public.
if it's a boot password, it's something else as well. The boot is housed in the actual BIOS EEPROM, not CMOS. The Cmos is where the Bios password is located. The BOOT password is done before post even happend and will block the system from booting. It's not a clearable thing either. Due to it being in the actuall BIOS config not the CMOS which is the (delta) changes for the bios.
Good luck to you...