Locked out of Dell Laptop

[NewComer]

I configured the BIOS password but now it has been lost on a friends Dell Latitude D610. He tried doing a CMOS Battery resetting and removed main battery, pulled CMOS battery, shorted the terminals and then inserted it back in the laptop.

When I rebooted the system, it came up and occurs the message as "Invalid Setup" such as the CMOS had been reset but he still unable to access any of the BIOS settings. Is there any other method to clear the password. MB jumper, etc. There is a "Pay for unlock guidelines sale on Ebay". Is that real or a scam."

[Killen]

You are right and the thing that you are explaining is absolutely right and It is probably a scam and they just tell you to move the jumper. I will only suggest you to go for the laptop repairing, if you are running in the warranty period and you need to make a call to the Dell customer support and I am sure they will help you to resolve your issues related to this ?

[Rawko]

The problem is so higher than that. The issue is the laptop contains some NV memory and eeprom. If you reconfigure the BIOS settings, it auto-reloads from the NV memory. There are so many users are purchasing used laptops and getting locked out of their own machines. A lot of forums posts around the net on this. I figured out it a challenge. The running theory is by shorting a couple of pins on a specific chip you and force a NV reset. I am not sure that the chip or the pins. I got some news that the pins are #6 & 4. I have not confirmed the process either whether the CMOS battery requires to be in or out for this.

First one who gets it wins.

[deoWo]

If reconfiguration of the CMOS (how one would ordinarily clear it) doesn't evaluate in a cleaning the password, it makes sense that there would be a backup for it in some appropriate location. Course I could say something about someone selling a laptop on Ebay, and not distributing the password, or changing it to something easy (in case it's a password they don't need to provide), while providing that, else destroy the password for purposes of shipping it. That however would not help much more here. It seems that calling to the Dell support would be your best bet, though I am not sure what their policy is on helping the user who purchased one of their machines from someone (like an Ebay seller), other then a Dell authorized seller.

[RoninBlade]

I am not sure that the particular of this NV memory (as well I do not have one of these laptops or the like), but the concept of resolving the issue would be to restricted this from re-loading the CMOS settings stored there, forcing the password out of that.

One could configure the BIOS if the EEPROM is socket able, by disconnecting the BIOS chip, and either flashing it in another board, a BIOS flash tools (According to me, they had one of these in some of the hardware engineering classrooms we have down at the colleges I am there), or by swaping in different BIOS chip. Though it could be possible to change out the BIOS, if someone remove the BIOS chip, I am not sure that it would help to destroy the auto-refresh being advice from CMOS memory itself. It might still refresh this ?

[Hardwareman]

If all are getting failed to do then you need to take some other steps in such situation and you may have to wipe the BIOS password by resetting the RTC (Real Time Clock) IC (Integrated Circuit) placed on your motherboard.

Several RTC's need an external battery. If your RTC is one of this kind, you can wipe the BIOS password just by unsocketing the RTC and reseating it. RTC's that need the external batteries contains:

1. Dallas Semiconductor DS12885S
2. TI benchmarq bq3258S
3. Motorola MC146818AP
4. Hitachi HD146818AP
5. Samsung KS82C6818A

[T.J.]

Hello,
I am going to try to write fine and I apologize for my bad English.Just take a look here and I fixed this by two methods with the fewer guidelines :

move to the BIOS menu issuing DEL key at the beginning of system boot. And try to find the password setting and disable this. If you are unable to log on BIOS system configuration then You should take off the hard disk and save entire data in different machine. Then perform the reformatting of your PC with the system restore setting. Try to find in Google.com "quit BIOS password on DELL Inspiron" and I am sure that you are going to find a number of information. I hope that it would be helpful for you .

Greetings!