Notebook CMOS and Hard Drive Passwords

[Ed Wood]

Greetings,

I just purchased a Dell Latitude CPt V notebook from ebay for my mother's 87th birthday. I got it for a very low price. When I powered it up, I could not access the hard drive. It was password protected. I rebooted and went into the BIOS hoping to change the boot sequence to boot from the CD-ROM so that I could format the hd. The BIOS was password protected so that I could not make any changes.

I contacted the seller (Andover Consulting Group - Andover Computer Liquidators) to find out who had previously owned the notebook, so that I could give the informaton to Dell to access the password. They told me that the company had gone bankrupt, and they did not know who it was.

In talking with Dell technical support, the only information I was able to get was to contact Customer Care and see if they would research the computer by the Service Tag or Express Service Code and give me the password information.

I downloaded some BIOS and CMOS cracker software to try to run that, but the notebook would not even recognize the floppy drive, so I was not able to use that method.

I have contacted the Kuiama Systems in the UK, and am waiting for them to email me the password that they say might work on my hard drive. However, they do not make any promises that it will work. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks for your help.

[john_phoenix]

Try
http://qasimtoep.tripod.com/dell/dell.html

This will get rid of the BIOS password and the power on password but the hard drive password means a new drive, There is companies out ther that say they can recover passwords but they are expensive. Cheaper to buy a new 2 1/2" drive and fit it yourself.

Hope this is of help

[Ed Wood]

John,

Thanks for the reply. This procedure is rather complicated, however I might be forced to use it.

In the meantime, I have emailed Michael S. Dell and explained my situation to him, asking him to get his technical support people to help me. I will wait for a few days to see if he responds to my appeal before I tackle the disassembly of my notebook.

Regards.