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
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.
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.
yeah but in this case, it was like 50 mini workstations so it’d basically be replacing all 50 machines.
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.
I once bought a 2014 era thinkpad laptop that was locked with a supervisor password and I was able to remove it by using tweezers to short 2 pins on the password chip.
- I located the password chip on the motherboard. I think it was an 8 pin chip.
- I press tweezers to 2 pins. I don’t remember which pin this was. I think it was gnd to something else. The intention here was to make the chip unreadable.
- I enter the bios and navigate to the screen for setting a supervisor password. Because the motherboard could not read the chip, the mother board thinks that there is no password.
- When I have the “set advisor password prompt” open, I removed the pin short. I typed a new password and press accept. The bios overwrites the old password on the chip.
- Reboot the machine and remove the password by typing the password that you created.
that isnt forced obsolescence, it’s a security feature that is working correctly.
It prevents people from messing with your secure boot keys for example, which is useful to make sure things haven’t been tampered with software wise.
Considering I had to get a new HD for it, I am not worried about the software.
Not that it has any software to speak of, since it doesn’t boot. Except to windows, which as far as I can tell cannot exist in a state of non-tamperedness.
Exactly as secure as if I let it soak in a bathtub all night. Software definitely not compromised.
It’s mostly for businesses to lock down company computers. They can be more confident that users haven’t installed certain kinds of viruses or otherwise screwed something up. For someone running Linux they installed themselves it won’t make a big security difference.
There are Linux distros that can be installed with secure boot enabled. Are you prevented from installing them due to being unable to modify BIOS settings?
They didn’t very much care about not doing effectively planned obsolescence either. It’s one of those things where they could have, I don’t know, a program where you have to call the company to have it unlocked, and maybe they make you wait 2 weeks to prevent against an “evil maid” style attack? Maybe it gives you a scary message when you boot it from then on like chrome OS does.
If you still wanted to do an evil maid attack, and you were very committed, you could still just buy another of the same model of laptop, set up your rootkits or whatever else, then stuff the new guts in the old computer.
seems to me like if you got it together to have a maid, and an evil one at that, you got it together to buy a second laptop
I think it should be disabled when the storage is removed, or after some arbitrary amount of time, or some other smart nerd solution I can’t even conceive of.
hmm interesting
website has a new kind of “are you human” which I can’t seem to solve so searched via site: and I find a close model number (the devices share a user manual) but not the exact one. This would be a major learning project so might take me a while to get to it.
when you say “usb tools” what do you mean?
What laptop is it? You may be able to find a master password online that will let you in. A bunch of older laptops have them and they’re very well documented.
Someone else insisted so here is all the details
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model: Acer Aspire V3-575T
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UEFI Version: 2.4
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Board name: Usopp_SL
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Board version: 1.18
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BIOS manufacturer: Insyde Corp
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BIOS version: 1.18
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BIOS date: May 25, 2017
It seems to be down at the moment, but I’ve used this website with success in the past: https://bios-pw.org/
Basically you incorrectly guess that password a few times, if it gives you a code you type it into the website.
