IBM T23 BIOS Password LOST

I have 2 Thinkpads, both are the same model. One is locked/password protected in BIOS (Supervisor password). I understand its a major undertaking to unlock, so I was wondering if I can swap parts from the unlocked laptop over to the locked one? The locked one is in much better shape and there is nothing on the hard drive that I cant replace. Can someone tell me if it is possible to do away with this password issue by installing hardware from the open system into the locked one? If so, which parts will need to be replaced? I think the system board and hard drive but I'm not sure. I cant get into BIOS so I have to assume that Administrator & User have also been password protected. Thanks!

 

The easiest way is to simply download bios and update it and it will remove the password.

 

IBM got a lot of complaints over the T20 series because of this. Many, MANY of these laptops became doorstops due to forgotten passwords or kids playing around in the BIOS. The security uses 3 different chips on the motherboard, and each chip holds a different encrypted checksum of the password. When a password is entered by the user, it is compared against the decrypted checksum from these 3 chips. If it doesn't match, you're locked out after 3 tries. Because it is 3 separate chips, just flashing the BIOS or removing the BIOS battery doesn't work. The chips are soldered to the main board so they cannot be easily swapped out by most home hobbyists. There was a guy in Australia who posted some schematic on the web about how to build a device that clipped on to the chips and was then plugged into the serial port on a working PC. You'd then run his program and it would extract the encrypted checksums and store them in a binary (.bin) file. The file is still encrypted and does nobody any good, except for the Australian; you'd email the .bin file and Paypal him $30 or $50 or whatever it was, and in a few days he'd email the password. This was about 4-5 years ago and I have no idea if this is still an option. I still have the printed out schematic somewhere and a friend of mine actually did the whole thing, Paypal'ed the money and everything, and the password he got emailed worked perfectly. IBM had told him $550 to to replace the motherboard, so $40 in parts and another $50 to Paypal was a bargain. But other than this, I know of no way to get past the power-on-passwords on the IBM T20 series of laptops. So, in answer to your question, swapping out parts has nothing to do with anything and will not make any difference with the password, it doesn't care about parts, only the checksums from the 3 chips.