My friend gave me their old laptop before they left town. I was going to install linux on it and use it for a server.
I have basically given up doing anything because the BIOS is locked with a Secure Boot supervisor password which I guess they forgot about being there.
I’ve sent a message asking if they happen to remember it and would feel comfortable sharing it if it is not one they use for anything else. But the odds of both those things being the case are slim and I don’t feel good about trying to get someone to share any password. Especially since it was so kind to just give me the machine in the first place. It’s not practical to physically get the device and the person together in the near future.
It’s impossible (or past my skill level) to install linux on this thing without the freaking password. I did manage to install windows. Last time I did that it was win2k. It will boot OK but I can’t use that to circumvent the lock. But Ubuntu and a couple other distros are no gos.
It is so fucked that computers can be rendered bricks like this. Obviously yet another way to design in obsolescence disguised as a security feature. Encryption is one thing; this is independent of any data.
Gaaaaaah I spent most of the weekend trying to install linux on this otherwise perfectly functional machine. I think it’s toast though.
A lot of the time motherboards have a two pins you can short to reset the BIOS to the factory install. Not sure if older laptops or laptops in general have them or not though.
Dell has an info page that shows reseating a motherboard CMOS battery to reset the bios https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000124377/how-to-perform-a-bios-or-cmos-reset-and-clear-the-nvram-on-dell-systems
Modern dell machines will require you to call in to support, where you give part of the serial and they give you a master unlock.
Gone are the days of the cmos reset. The sysadmin at work was fired for being racist, then asked for a consultants fee to unlock the machines he didn’t write down the passwords for.
My machine is Acer and apparently you can bring it to an “acer service centre” (whatever that is) and they will fix for a fee rumored to be about $100.
yeah but in this case, it was like 50 mini workstations so it’d basically be replacing all 50 machines.
Oh actually I came across something like this for my device except it seemed like it had a high chance of error and really frying the machine so I skipped it. Maybe I will return to it assuming the password doesn’t magically appear in the near future.
I did try removing both batteries and the RAM and letting it sit for a few hours in hopes it would reset because I read something on a forum about that. I wasn’t too hopefully it would work and it sure didn’t.
It’s not really likely to fry anything. The CMOS battery is separate from the device’s regular batteries, it’s usually a little watch battery, there to keep bios settings and run the clock.
glans is probably talking about jumper pins located on the board to reset the password, which could cause some troubles if you jump the wrong pins, though probably not complete machine death.
