Last night, I hacked Darrell’s Dell Latitude laptop. I’ll update this more later, because I’m busy at work.
Once I received the AC adapter for the laptop, I plugged it in and let the battery charge first. When the charging was complete, I booted the laptop.
You must type in the administrator password before you can access this computer.
Please type in the administrator password and press [Enter] to continue.
You son of a bitch. (Arnold Schwarzenegger style!)
It looks like Darryl bought a laptop that was stolen. Dell Support doesn’t help those who have acquired their systems second-hand without the proper transfer of ownership procedure. So, I tried the obvious things – I removed the battery and the CMOS battery. Left them out for 24 hours. Plugged them back in – no go. Looked at a motherboard schematic, tried to find a CMOS reset DIP or pin… nothing. Searched the web, finally found some information – these damn admin passwords are built directly into an onboard chip on the mobo. The only way to remove them was to replace the mobo itself. Dammit! I finally found a hacker site about forcibly resetting these chips – which was well hidden. It took me a couple hours to locate this bastard (it was underneath a tape shield beneath the PC card module assembly. Then, according to the site, I had to reassemble the laptop so that I could see the LCD display and access the keyboard AND the chip at the same time. No easy task. The chip sits just slightly below where the keyboard rests, so I had very minimal lighting and access to the chip. The next step was to power on the laptop and use a paper clip to short pins 3 and 6 together, which would erase the administrator password (as well as the ability to access the asset information in BIOS). I did this, and it was a success! I’ll post pictures of the laptop later.
Oh yeah, there IS a downside to all this work. The hard drive also has a password on it. That one is a no-hack, from what I can tell so far.
Current Music: Hamasaki Ayumi – HONEY
Can’t you use a low-level util such as Linux to hack the hard drive? Use a hex editor on the raw /dev/hda device?
I could, but the guy is only paying me for the parts and I’m not that curious. I’ll probably put it aside for later when the urge arises or something.
Oh, yeah, it’s a laptop hard drive, so I’ll need to install *NIX on a laptop or pick up a 2.5″-3.5″ hard drive adapter or something.
Don’t suppose you’ve stil got the address of that dell hacking site do ya cause i’m desprate to get past my bios password too
Sorry… I googled it back then, so by now, I’ve forgotten it. Good luck!