Good challange here. Lost both os & bios pwds =(

Hey guys,



this is my first post, so hello to everyone and thank you for your replies.



I just dug up my old laptop which was supposed to have a failed motherboard, but to my delightful surprise it boots up just fine. Its an ASUS GL551. The problem is this...I do not have admin access to bios, only user level access, so I cannot change the boot sequence. Then, I don't have the windows login info either, and I never setup the admin account to be visible from the login screen. My old boot sequence is: HDD, DVD, network....so no USB. Further more, I have tried to boot from other various operating systems, Mint, Trinity, torrented Win7, none of them would boot, except my official purchased Win7, but when I boot from it and select "repair system" or whatever, I get an error saying: "this version of system recovery options is not compatible". I can just do a full format...I think...propbably not...considering the lack of bios access, but I have some precious data on this machine. If any of you guys can find some magical workaround, I would very much appreciate it.



bios info: Vendor - American Megatrends ver. 204



Thanks again.



--Buddha

rvcjew said:

We can not help you circumvent the bios issue but you could try pulling your CMOS battery out of the unit for a while and see what happens. If you just need data off the HDD then you can do this by pulling the drive and just looking at the ntfs partitions in something like parted magic or Ubuntu on another machine.

Malcolm

That's ok, there was no need to gut my machine, poor thing isn't feeling well as it is. Anyway, I solved the issue..here's how its done in 3 steps:

1. Change the date to 2002/01/02 in bios with the user level account. (since you can still get in at user level and the only thing you can chance is time.
2. Save and reboot.
3. When the enter password window appears hit "Alt + R", a "Enter rescue password" window will appear, with 2002/01/02 date showing (if not the code won't work), enter the following rescue password : ALAA4ABA

Can't believe I spent half a day on this, but at least I found a neat little trick when I thought I was doomed to gutting the laptop.

Thanks anyway!

rvcjew said:

That's the stuff we can't help you find but you can always find on your own glad you got it sorted.

Malcolm

Is that part of the forums rules? Meaning, if someone else has a similar issue, I'm not allowed to provide this kind of information? I assume the answer is that I'm not allowed, since I cannot see this thread on the forum, yet it still exists..