Stolen Laptop

[SirDice]

I was a bit intrigued by the Eeprom issue, not having ever had it come up personally. There were a few sites that claimed the only method around that was the old soldering iron and a replacement chip. I saw some others mention using ultraviolet to clear the password. Others claimed you could send it to them and they would fix it for you (providing you proved legitimate ownership) for a fee.

About 10 years ago I was a certified Compaq and Toshiba service engineer working for a repairshop. Some laptop models did have those eeprom passwords, even back then. IIRC for certain Toshiba models you needed to have a special connector, attach it to the printer port, turn the laptop on while holding F2 and the bios password would be cleared. Taking the batteries out really didn't work.

UV light erases 'regular' eproms not eeproms. Soldering the chip off will of course work but since it's all SMD you would need special equipment. One little trick I learned while working for a modem company was to temporarily short the Data-OUT to ground (it used a serial data interface) of the eeprom and turn it on. That would effectively erase it.