Stumped - for once....

At work we have just come across a Toshiba Tecra 520CDT laptop that was stuck in a filing cabinet of someone who had left a couple of years ago. It powers up OK but has a BIOS password which no body knows. Removing the CMOS battery is a convolued affair as they are soldered in and and (AFAIK) it wouldn't get me past the password if I removed them for a time period.

The standard Toshiba "backdoor" passwords for the BIOS do not appear to work so does anyone know a way to get into the BIOS to reset the password or kill it completely.

Now I know this may sound dubious to some of you and I will understand if you do not wish to post a way round the BIOS password. I will happily rceive a PM from anyone or even an answer via an administrator (Halo?) so as to not put the answer into the public domain.

If any admins think I'm asking too much then just delete this message - I'll understand.

Yargwel :major

 

Check out http://tinyurl.com/293wyg

There are 3 $$$$ links that might help you. There are other links that might be worth investigating. Scroll down the page for more. Best of luck. Bazza

 

Cheers Bazza. The company I work for don't like spending cash and they are happy to ditch the laptop but I can't bring myself to let them do that. I'm going to try a hardware fix which I've been pointed at.

 

I am guessing that there were some FREE links in the body of the URL. Can't be sure, though, as I didn't check them out. Bazza

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Yargwel, did you get the PM I sent you?

 

Some older Toshibas can be forced to go around the password by using a device that's made from an old parallel printer cable. You connect a bunch of the pins and plug it into the parallel port, and when you power up, you can get into the BIOS. But I don't remember if it actually removes the password, or if just turns it off while the thing is connected. I built one like 4 years ago, and it worked, but I can't remember how I made it. I did find the schematic online somewhere, and the phrase 'boot blocker' comes to mind, but that may be something totally different. If you can boot to the floppy (or CD) drive, there are bootable utils that will wipe out all BIOS settings to factory default. A bit of creative Googling should track 'em down.
Good luck!

 

Yes thanks Maxwell. I did send you a reply too.

 

I'm going to attempt to wield a soldering iron in the next day or two. :eek

 

I had a password finding period, some time ago, and found plenty of cracks when in Windows, and 5 little downloads to attemp bios crack.. I never beat the bios password on the one I was trying to beat (I wanted to update the bios, and had to do it from floppy, but could not get into the bios, at all)
I saw the tool, better described, and pictured on-line, then, I will look into my archives to find more, but I kept this link, and it still works, so it explains how to make it - I never tried it, mind, as I am not good with a soldering tool.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/CmosPwd

I will post more, if I can root it out of my geeks folders (I will tidy them up , one day)

 

P.S sent you private message

 

Just to let everyone who has offered their help and suggestions that I managed to get the password reset today using a recommended hardware method. The laptop is running Windows 95 and is going to replace an old AST laptop which failed this afternoon - and that was running Windows 3.1.

Thanks to everyone who offered help and suggestions. It's most appreciated. :major

 

So the parallel device worked? Cool :cool The link provided above by baklogic shows the 'device' I was talking about; it's a "loopback" cable, not the "bootblocker" I was thinking it might possibly be. Hey, I got the two O's right, and a B and the CK...
Glad to hear all is well...