BIOS crack.

[fir3maze]

Hi guys,

I'm struggeling getting into my BIOS, for some reason when I loaded my old laptop up it had a password for the BIOS. I don't feel comfortable jumping the CMOS as it's a laptop, but I found a software tool that cracks it for you.

It's called cmospwd 4.8 and it show you the pass for the BIOS.

When I look at it, it tells me [QFd] [#] for the acer bios. I've tryed typing that in all possible manners, but it doesn't seem to work.

Am I doing somthing wrong? Is there another way to go about this?

Thanks in advance.

[psychokiller]

i have an acer TM4000 series too and tried those softwares alot and yet they dnt work neither them nor the dumpers

i guess it's because Acer uses a special Pheonix Bios for them and that i couldnt break it lots of times but there were some topics that discussed these topics specially for Acer try googling it or simply Email the Acer Info Center and ask them how to get it back not Cracking it :D

Some Social Engineering might work here

[VaKo]

Best way to clear a password is to crack the thing open and pull all the power sources you can find. Then leave it over night (or how ever long it takes to lose the charge) and when you next boot it, it should have no stored information for the BIOS settings. The software ones I'm dubious about, keep hearing about people bricking there motherboards thanks to a BIOS cracker.

[moonlit]

Yeah, from my experience laptops have the same as a desktop: a small battery. Rip this out, let it sit, problem solved.

[fir3maze]

Thanks for the replys.

I tryed getting into the laptop but the darn screws are in there tight. I can acces the modem and RAM really easy, they are under little lids that have been screwed down gently.

The screws actully holding the laptops casings down are really hard to get out, I'm worried about damaging the threads on the screws if I rive at it to much.

If I actully manage to get the casing off where about would I find te CMOS in a laptop? I'm sure they vary but this guy told me that you have to take the monitor off and then go in as the CMOS battery is just under the keyboard. This was in a pub, and the guy was quite unstable but I guess it makes sense making the the CMOS battery hard to get to.

[VaKo]

It depends, it its a low end consumer model them its usually a nightmare of plastic and bad design. If its a Thinkpad or Dell you should be able to field strip it with a penknife in minutes. From what your saying, you have a HP or similar, which requires you to remove the screen, keyboard and top half of the laptop case to get at the internals. The last time I did one of these it took about half an hour to get at the CMOS battery. Remove that, and the main battery and you should wipe it. Unless they use Flash to backup the bios, in which case its a trip to tech support.

[fir3maze]

Its a low spec Acer (Travelmate 240) I finally managed to get the screws out, but there seems to be alot of pressure around the monitor edges connected to the laptop. I dont see any obvious screws to take the monitor off. There also seems to be a piece of aluminum attached to the top half (once im kind of looking inside) and the bottom half. I can't imagine it begin so fucking diffucult to get inside!

I'm not taking it to a tech shop it isnt worth much to me, I was just going to put a Linux distro on it and mess about, but I need the BIOS to boot of CD, unless theres another way I can boot of CD from the windows OS?

[moonlit]

Well in some cases it's possible to boot a virtual machine in VMware with a virtual hard drive linked to your real hard drive and begin an OS in there. When it comes to rebooting, the bootloader has already been written so the install proceeds as if you'd started normally.

This is a LAST RESORT though, it will not work in all cases with all OS' on all configurations so don't try it unless you're confident you have to try this option and you know what you're doing. It can (and will) mess up the OS you currently have installed.