Re: Window's password forgotten

From: Curtis Anderson (nedfla@hotmail.com)
Date: 01/15/03 

From: "Curtis Anderson" <nedfla@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 09:51:51 -0600

Bill Sanderson <Bill_Sanderson@msn.com.plugh.org> uttered:
> Some laptop machines have passwords which are not recoverable. IBM
> thinkpads have several levels of passwords--power up, administrative,
> and disk, I think--I believe power-up can be recovered by shorting a
> couple of solder pads on the main circuit board at the right moment.
> Administrative requires replacing that main circuit board--probably
> not cheap, and disk requires replacing the disk.
>
> Not a feature to be careless with!

I'm a bit of an expert with IBM ThinkPad gear.
With the disk password, depending on model you can sometimes get past them
by swapping the controller board of the drive itself with one from another
identical disk that has no/a known password. On newer models, the password
is written to a reserved track on the disk and there is no way short of
running the drive through an MRI scanner to erase it. Of course that makes
the drive a little bit useless as well....;-)
Maybe it could be bypassed if one is sophisticated enough to write a
replacement firmware for the disk drive itself which skips the password
check, but we're getting a little esoteric now.
Same with power-up/admin passwords. They're now kept in a small VNRAM chip
and there's really no way to bypass it without replacing the chip (which
involves some rather expensive surface-mount soldering gear to accomplish)
or coding your own system BIOS that skips the check.

Like Bill said, not a feature to be careless with.

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