Hey, I hope this is isn the right forum .. it seemed the most fitting to me. Anyway, I friend of mine came over tonight and was wanting me to help him set some stuff up on his laptop. One of the things he wanted me to do was disable his BIOS password, I went in blanked it out, saved and rebooted. After that it wouldn't let me past the bios password (which should have been gone). I tryed everything, his old password, a single space, all spaces, so on and so on.

So after none of that worked I turned to the internet, after a quick search on google I was able to find posts on various message boards from people that this has happened to with this particular ver. of the BIOS. They change/disable the password, reboot and then can't get back into it. The thing is, out of all those I was never able to find a fix. I searched around and found lists of backdoor passwords, I went through about 40 with no luck. And a search on here only gave me 1 result that didn't have a fix either .

Can anyone give me any ideas? I've thought about trying to get in with a boot disk and resetting it with debug but I want to be sure that I don't damage the machine. I've found a few BIOS password recovery tools but I'm not sure how reliable they are and so on. Worst case scenario I guess would be tearing it open and pulling the battery for a few minutes. I've never taken apart a laptop though and don't know if it's something I'd want to try on someone elses machine.

If any of you can give me any suggestions I would really appreciate it, I could post the code I would use in debug if any of you are familiar with it and could tell me exactly what it does. Here's his BIOS ver.

PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0

and here's his laptop info ..

HP OMNIBOOK XE3 BIOS Version GC.M1.61

Any info would be appreciated.

-gunder
p.s. I am going to call HP in the morning but I kinda doubt they'd have a fix for me over the phone and I would like to fix it withought sending it back to them if possible.