I Bought a BIOS-Locked PC. Should You?

Your BIOS dump seems to be exactly 16M, which means its probably a full dump of the BIOS chip, even white space that might exist at the end of the chip. Most manufacturers don't fill their BIOS chips to the brim, mainly for BIOS updates and patches in the future. It's possible the HP and community BIOS's are complete images, just truncated to exclude the white space that would exist at the end of the chip

Something to try that's worked several times for me with various desktop and server motherboards, although sadly isn't an easy option for most laptops: On a lot of boards, if you replace the CPU, it will allow you one-time access to even the most locked-down BIOS, so if you have another spare CPU for your locked motherboard, remove the BIOS battery, close the CMOS jumper, then replace the CPU. Remove the CMOS jumper, replace the battery, and switch on. Some boards will take you straight to BIOS and others will give you a message to say the CPU has been changed and to press (usually) F1 to enter BIOS. Once in there, you MUST remember to change or remove the password at that point, because if you leave the original password set, it's a one-time deal until you replace the CPU again.

My biggest win was using a grounding trick on a thinkpad t430s to get around a bios lock. There's many videos on youtube, but the gist is you carefully use a pair of metal tweezers to ground the data pin during (not before) POST. The password is seen as blank on that boot, and you can easily set and then disable the admin password. This let me enable virtualization, update the bios, and enable the express card port.

Cheers for the shout out, great video - whish I could get this much information into 10mins! In-circuit flashing (with the clamp) is definitely possible as you've discovered, but I always de-solder the chip, as unless you have a detailed understanding of the platform, you never know what else is getting powered up by the clamp, and what else is listening on the bus. Soldering is also dangerous, but I know those risks a lot more than if the PCH is going to breakdown when an unmodded CH341a bashes 5v onto the SPI bus. It's low current sure, but I don't need to roll those dice if I flash out-of-circuit.

I used to have a defective RAM bar, if you insert it into the computer, the data loaded into the initial addresses will be corrupted by the BIOS in an attempt to restore it loads the default settings and the password disappears it was very convenient

There is another way of removing BIOS-password by using Intel ME software. Basically, it allows you to read and write BIOS chip from Windows, without soldering the chip. However, a few things need to be considered: - It's needed to remove/change position of a jumper if you wanna flash to BIOS chip while reading from it doesn't. Some times you need to use a wire as the jumper is removed by default. - Make sure that you have the right BIOS to flash to the chip. Otherwise you can't boot up. In that case you will need desolder the chip and use a programmer to flash BIOS to it. Overall, while this technique could be avoid of using solder-iron, it requires some knowledge of understanding motherboard (and maybe reading schematic) and BIOS flash.

On devices of some manufacturers like Fujitsu, you can remove the bios lock by entering three specific "passwords". Then you get a long number shown on the screen which you can enter into a calculator found on the internet. There you get a code you can enter as a password to gain access to the bios.

BIOS said: 37 times

Picked up a bios locked 845 G7 from work for 20 bucks. Had to learn how to desolder and reprogram the bios, but it wasn't too difficult for me since I at least have some soldering skills and watch LOTS of board level repair videos in my free time. Threw in some ram and a drive, and I have a killer daily driver that cost under 100 bucks total.

Notice if you are running a HP ProBook/EliteBook/ZBook up to the Folio 9470m: DO NOT JUST OVERWRITE THE BIOS WITH A DUMP THAT EXISTS ON THE INTERNET. Because when you do, the Serial Numbers and the MAC Address of the Ethernet Card gets overwritten. What you should instead do is capture the Current BIOS, flash an unlocked one, power the PC on, flash the original locked bios while the PC is running, set a new Password and then reboot. Otherwise you will for example get Code 43 for the Ethernet Chip because the MAC Address is incorrect, and there could be problems with Windows Activation.

One of my favorites is the older laptops with a password chip. If it reads 0000s from the chip it assumes no password. The trick is you short the clock and data pins right when it checks for a password, it won't see one and you can get into the BIOS. Then set a blank password, it will overwrite the stored password. If you find that the motherboard is stealing the power from your clip programmer it might be pulling the voltage down too low. I keep a 1/2 charged Lithium Ion battery around ~3.6v to connect along with the CH341A. The other option would be powering the board and letting it provide the power to the chip. I do run into chips that need pulled from the board at times.

I have a really old Toshiba Pentium III laptop that somebody gave me and it had a BIOS password. It has a parallel port on the back (yes, it's that old!) but I found out researching online that you could reset the BIOS password by wiring a few pins together on the back of a D25 parallel connector and then powering on the machine with that connector plugged into the parallel port - and, yes, it did work exactly as expected. So clearly there are a few "weird and wonderful" things out there that might allow a BIOS password to be reset.

I know you didn't cover it but one Hard Disk password exploit that worked well for me on ide/sata spinning rust drives was to power on machine with unlocked hard disk into the bios and into the security settings, hot swap the drive to the locked drive, select to lock drive and set a password, save and exit. Upon boot it will still be locked but only with the password you provided. Now you can go into bios and unlock with the password you set.

From experiences I have had with these Mini PCs and some whacky BIOS mods I have done in the past (going from turbo boost unlocking on Haswell to NVMe module injection), these sometimes require the power brick connected and a power cycle while - power button is kept pressed - to allow the chip to be powered and selected (floating SS line) and avoid the tedious (de)soldering task! Another pro-tip to whom it may concern, AMI bioses sometimes are flashable without needing the (risky) HDA_SD0 pin short or the ME disable jumper on with AFUWIN v3.05.04 and the magic /GAN flag!

On a lot of aftermarket mobos you have options. Simple clear cmos, alternate bios, or a socketed bios chip you can just replace. I've picked up some good deals on hardware that was locked.

For many systems there's also some default passwords available that can be used to unlock a machine. Worked fine for an M93p I grabbed off Ebay for cheap.

Reminds me of my original Xbox modding days, desoldering corrupted eeprom chips or bios chips, tsops, flashing them. Modding bios, corrupting them again. Good times

This randomly appeared on my homepage and I'm so glad it did. I got a bunch of Optiplex 7070s from a school that was tossing them out, and I discovered that one of them had both a dead battery and a BIOS lock—meaning I couldn't even fix the incorrect clock until after booting up. Turns out this model does have that jumper, which is not just conveniently labeled PSWD, there are even instructions printed nearby that say "1-2: NORMAL, EMPTY: CLEAR PASSWORD". Considering how easy it would be for a kid to reboot and mess with stuff, I'm surprised it was the only one they had bothered to lock. Must have been the computer lab teacher's computer. 😄

I don't buy bios-locked pc, simply because I don't have the time or tools or patience to work on it just to save $20 (roughly), unless the unlock is guaranteed and is super easy. The only time this would make sense is if I'd save at least $100 by buying a bios-locked pc/motherboard and if it is worth the effort to do so, like a rare PC. But it is fascinating to watch others do it. It feels like magic.

Setting a bios password on random computers you get your hands on sounds like the most evil plan for world domination.