toshiba passwords

[barry]

I have had a toshiba satellite 4100XCDT given to me, which was in good working order. Before I recieved it I told the previous owner (My son in law) to remove all his data from it. He has done this, and also removed his administrator capabilities. Now I cannot access anything. On boot up I get the toshiba logo, and then it asks for a password. I don't know what this password is. It is not the previous admin one. The computer was running windows 200, and it was my intention to install windows XP, but at the moment i cannot do anything with it. Any suggestions other than the bin would be appreciated.

[TechAdvance]

Flashing the BIOS will unlock the HDD but not the BIOS itself

Removing the battery from the Motherboard for 30 seconds and resetting the CMOS might work but from what i remember toshiba have good security

You should be able to boot from the XP CD and format the drive..

 

Try entering this as a password - Toshiba

[danzil]

what bios do you have.it will tell you on first boot up, ie award,ami,phoenix

there are some backdoor passwords.have you tried Toshiba worked on older models.

like techadvance said removing the cmos battery may work, unless the password is stored on a chip.

If all else fails, you may have to clear the BIOS password by resetting the RTC (Real Time Clock) IC (Integrated Circuit) on your motherboard.

 

Many RTC's require an external battery. If your RTC is one of this type, you can clear the BIOS password just by unsocketing the RTC and reseating it.

 

RTC's which require external batteries include:

 

Dallas Semiconductor DS12885S

TI benchmarq bq3258S

Motorola MC146818AP

Hitachi HD146818AP

Samsung KS82C6818A

Most RTC chips with integrated batteries can be reset to clear the BIOS password by shorting two pins together for a few seconds.

 

this is not for the faint hearted tho the chips are small and shorting the wrong pins will corrupt your bios, and on some occasions kill your moard leaving you will an expensive doorstop.

 

try the cmos battery first

regards

danzil

[hardware_dave]

Ok this is odd. You are seeing the toshiba boot password, there is also a bios password to protect the bios but that is not what you are seeing -

 

"On boot up I get the toshiba logo, and then it asks for a password"

 

Since you did not set the password, your son in law did. And he had to type it in every time he turned his laptop on.

 

Why not ask him for the password ?

 

The toshiba security system is a good one, it is designed to make stolen laptops useless to the thief. The password is not stored in the NVRAM so even if you pull the laptop to bits and desolder the batt it wont work. You cant reflash the bios to clear the password as you cant boot from floppy or cd without the password. None of the backdoor passwords work on toshiba's.

 

The above is not quite true for early p3 toshiba laptops, they did store the password in the NVRAM. Some you had to short 2 pins with the batt on, some with the batt off.

 

dave

[hardware_dave]

WOW. I just checked the specs on that model. XP on a p2 400 ? Forget it. It probably has abot 64 meg of memory and no way will you be able to get more than 128 on it.

 

The good news is if you can pull it apart, get the datasheet on the NVRAM/RTC, understand it and short out the correct pins then reassemble it,you may get a working laptop thats worth 30 quid.

 

Dave.