[Nuke]

404

[jr2]

Great... although, I just stumbled on a good point.. of BIOSes will lock you out after 3 bad passwords, and not let you know about it.  So, if you don't get the password right in 3 tries, your just typing against a brick wall... you have to reset after the third try.

EDIT  ;D

[Nuke]

yea i noticed, though in my case it just shuts down, not really a lockout. bios passwords have no purpose but to annoy techs and maybe to keep the kiddies out. it makes me question why everyday used by everyone computers need so much security.

[jr2]

Rename above attachment in my previous post to .exe
That's !BIOS

[jr2]

Bad news.... I looked up your laptop here, and it does have a "security chip", and supposedly, those cannot be erased by shorting or battery removal.    BTW, can you contact the person you got it from?  Ask them what the dumb password was.  If they got it elsewhere, ask them for the contact info for that person.

[Nuke]

well im not too sure thats a good idea. i got this computer from a buddy of mine. he didnt own it and was about to toss it. the previous owner, who was renting a room from my buddy, one day decided to drink 4 bottles of tequila and take some pills and who knows what else and then procede to trash my buddys place. anyway after the cops took him away, gave him some jail time and he later jumped town without retrieving his stuff. so one day when i went over to fix my buddy's printer het told me he was gonna throw away some old computer stuff, i said i would take it. anyway the morale of this story is that i get a free laptop with an unbreakable password.

getting ahold of the guy who owned it would probibly result in a drunken fight. so i would like to avoid that. if i absolutely need the password crack the password i could buy a replacement mobo. but i spent too much on this thing already. i should probibly also paint this thing incase mr drunk ever comes back to town.

[jr2]

Umm, $100 gets you a new security chip.  See above link.  So if you had to, that's the way to go.  Erg.  Ppl like that have no business making passwords anyways... how come only the nice ppl don't make passwords, and then get ripped off for it?    Whatever.  Try something simple, like HP or something the drunk would think of (prolly something he could see at the time, or his GF's name...)  *shrugs*

[Nuke]

i could replace the whole mobo for the same price.

http://www.notebookparts.com/products/description.php?II=540

this has the advantage of giving me a full set of specs on the mobo. id rather just deal with it as it is than spend money on it. unless of course i could upgrade this thing, bring it up to speed and get a better video card (which seems to be on a paralell riser card).

[jr2]

Meh.  Better to get one off of eBay, prolly.  I guess Laptop BIOS passwords actually work, unlike desktop BIOS passwords, which are easily defeated.

[Bob-san]

I've beat a password on a D845PE board simply by moving a jumper... anywho -- what about removing that security chip?

[Nuke]

that clears the cmos but not the eeprom. i didnt see a cmos jumper but i was able to reset the defaults by shorting the battery. tweaking the bios remains impossible.

[jr2]

That's because the jumper does clear the password on a desktop computer, because on a desktop computer, the password is stored with the BIOS settings on an EEPROM chip.  On a laptop, there are two EEPROM chips, one for BIOS settings that can be cleared, and one for the password, called the security chip, that cannot be cleared.

Now, Nuke, it is true that if you applied voltage at the correct points on the security chip, it would erase, no?  XD  Ofc, that might not work.  What would prolly work is one of those DOS utils that can dump you into BIOS setup, as long as no upper memory drivers are loaded.  Which should work, seeing as the BIOS is shadowed.  It might still ask for the password, though... grrrr.

Perhaps with a memory editor, you could change the shadowed BIOS password... unless that part isn't shadowed. 

Bah.  I'm going to search some hacker forums.  If the pros can do it, so can we!  XD

[Nuke]

fedex was supposed to deliver my pc card wifi adapter today. i was here but the tracking info said noone was home. its bad enough that 2 day shipping takes 4, but for them to show incompetance by knocking on the wrong door rather pisses me off. i hope i dont have this much trouble when the battery shows up.

this whole thing is good expierience dealing with laptops. makes me wish i hadnt scrapped my old laptop. i coulda probibly fixed the damn thing. such a shame it was a hella fast gaming laptop. crap by todays standards but in '02 it was somke serious awesome. nothing like being able to play flight sims on the bus to work everyday. the uv map of one of my ships was done on the way to work and i remember working on some of the dante at a bar with some rather scantily clad girls as bartenders.

[jr2]

I don't like Fed Ex.. I like UPS.  XD

[Nuke]

i perfer the post office, they dont jack the shipping for alaska

[Nuke]

well its 2 days late and i had to pick it up myself, but i got my wireless pc card. there is now sufficient em radiation flying around this place to give my cats brain tumors, but it worked without too much tweaking.

[jr2]

Good... the only thing about this that bothers me is the fact that a criminal would prolly be like "oh, that's easy... just short pins 3 and 9, like this *fzzt* password cleared!  Shiny!  Let's be bad guys!" while we can't do a darn thing.  Proves the old saying "Locks are for honorable people" or something like that.

[Nuke]

a bad guy would scratch out the serial number and take in to a shady pawn shop (i should know i used to work for one), then visit their crack dealer. unless of course the pawn shop was so shady that they would pay for the item with an illegal substance of your choice.

[jr2]

Hmm, well I meant if the laptop contained valuable information or something, and the BIOS password had been set to system-on instead of setup.

[Nuke]

i dont understand why they went through so much trouble to put the bios password on another chip. yet allowed me clear the boot password, format the drive and re-install a new os. the only real reason to have a bios password, is to keep the uneducated from tweaking settings that could damage the computer or cause instability. using it as a security feature just makes it harder to solve problems with the system. i would also think that increasing the number of chips on an already densely packed board would be avoided if at all possible.