Dell Precision M4300 - bios Locked ? ? ?

[HC1Gunner]

I have a Dell Precision M4300, and the HD started giving me issues, so I decided the replace the ATA HDD with a spare SSD I had lying around. When I went into the BIOS to change it from IDE to ACHI, (tried to boot with it, but SSD not seen), I found that all the darn settings were locked with security password. I have no idea if it’s using default Dell passwords or the previous owner set it, BTW, no chance of contacting previous owner. I tried both Password and Admin and neither of them worked, I know those are couple pwd’s Dell uses.
I thought I could treat it like desktop PC, so I removed the laptops battery and disconnected the CMOS battery. Came back over an hour later, and the darn BIOS is still totally locked down.
I even flashed the BIOS and updated it hoping this would give me fresh BIOS that wasn’t locked down, but it’s still locked. Not sure what’s going on, but I'm not used to BIOS saving its settings after all battery power has been removed, or the BIOS has been updated.
Any way of unlocking the BIOS settings?

 

[logicearth]

Laptops are not like a desktop were you can revert all BIOS settings including the passwords but pulling the CMOS battery. Laptops store the passwords and such in non-volatile memory which will survive without power. As for reseting the BIOS password, I believe Dell has some backdoor system. But I don't really know.

 

[HC1Gunner]

I ran every bios password app I could find, and ran all of them on Hirens 15.2, and none of them worked. None of the apps could see/report or clear the cmos. Don't know why moron manufactures have to look bios down so hard anyways.