On Saturday 27 August 2005 17:50, Christian Jones wrote: > On 8/27/05, black reaper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Also, a BIOS password can be easily removed if one has physical access to > > the box. The small CMOS battery can be popped out, and put back in (on the > > motherboard), erasing your password. > > > Not always, actually. I have a Dell laptop that's rumored to store > the password in some kind of ROM. Whatever the technical aspects, > removing the battery (actually, cutting the leads to it) didn't remove > the password.
The password you were unable to remove may well be a disk-drive password. I have an 8-year-old Dell laptop which provides in the bios the capability of setting a disk-drive password in addition to 2 bios passwords(boot and master). The question is 'WHICH disk password was set?' If it was the master disk password, you aren't going to get your data back - period. If it was the user disk password, you may be able to clear it via the master disk password. Good Luck! > Note that I'm not actually suggesting this as an effective security > mechanism, since most of these laptops also have a "Master" password, > but this one didn't---or at least none of the ones I tried with the > help of a Dell support person worked. Still, just important to > realize that it may or may not be as easy as popping a battery out and > in. > > -- > Christian Jones > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.aleph0.com/~chjones > > -- Tired of having to defend against Malware? (You know: trojans, viruses, SPYWARE, ADWARE, KEYLOGGERS, rootkits, worms and popups) Then Switch to OpenBSD with a KDE desktop!!!
