Acer Aspire 5100 hard drive password

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by G_Loc, Jul 29, 2008.

  1. G_Loc

    G_Loc Private E-2

    So my godmother's kids set a password on their laptop and forgot it, so it wouldn't get past the password screen. I took it apart, found the battery and cut one of the leads to clear the CMOS. I booted it up, no more password prompt, but now its asking for the hard drive password!

    I checked the BIOS and, sure enough, there's an option to set a hard drive password. Now what can I do?!

    Are there any boot CDs that can be used to clear such a password?
     
  2. niospecv

    niospecv Private E-2

    I have the exact same problem. Grrrr
     
  3. chookers

    chookers Staff Sergeant

    Bump.

    I'm wanting information on this as well - looking at a second hand Acer Aspire (model 5135 from memory) with a HDD password set. I can add a bit of extra info - I entered BIOS and tried the option to change the HDD password, using obvious possibilities as the password. When I typed in 'password' as a possibility, I got a message which said:

    Encrypt HDD Key
    17921251

    So anyone with good info for those of us looking for it, please let us know. :)
     
  4. chookers

    chookers Staff Sergeant

    I forgot about a couple of things...

    I tried setting the laptop to boot from the DVD drive first (in BIOS) and using Peter Nordahl's NT password recovery disk (couldn't remember if it might deal with an HDD password but didn't have access to the internet to check) and found that the CD was ignored and the HDD password was still demanded.

    I tried setting the BIOS to use F12 boot options but hitting F12 did nothing.

    I didn't try using F10, if that gets you into anything. I'm assuming there's a recovery partition on there somewhere but no way of proving it that I know of.

    Would network booting help? It's enabled on the laptop I am looking at and I think that's something that can be enabled anyway. I read somewhere about password protected HDDs not being assigned a drive letter and made available unless they are internal but I don't think network would really help there, would it?

    No hope of asking the previous owners for the password in this case, because I doubt they'd co-operate since the laptop was repossessed from them.

    I'm assuming the same advice would work for both (all three?) laptops since they are Acer Aspire or I'd start a new thread. So that probably sums up the situation for all of us.

    (By the way, the numbers were right but wrong order on the one I mentioned - 5315.)
     

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