Is there a way to bypass Hard drive and Poweron password of Lenovo Thinkpads

Many of you have understood by the title itself that what I am going to ask for. Lenovo Thinkpad system are equipped with poweron and hard drive password. You can enable the same from bios. So when you reboot they ask for password to access the system. The same lies for the hard drive which is needed at the time of formatting. I just want to know that is there a way by which both of this can be bypassed. That means someone can just access the system without the password information and access the system. I had tried some number of boot disks but that does not worked out. Does Linux OS has this kind of support which can remove the passwords and let to me access the system independently. And does it is worth to implement such kind of security on consumer products. Thanks.

You are asking about some kind of security hack for the laptop. Linux does has support for this, but it is not easy to do. The more complicated are HDD passwords which are stored in a chip in the hard drive not in the bios. Because of which even if you flash the bios the password does not goes. That is the reason many people recommend to keep a strong HDD password, so that the data cannot be accessed to anyone. The only way to get rid of this, change the hard drive. I am not sure that there is any kind of factory reset option available on such systems which can wipe out the password. If even it is available no one will tell you. The only basic thing that I can recommend you is to check the manual of laptop. They might be having some kind of restore information.

The power on password is the most easiest one to get rid of by bios reset. Or you can use disc like Live disc to access the data. For HDD the password are not removed so easily. You need to first enter the bios and modify the bios.

There are possibilities of getting rid of hdd password. You can try some live disc to perform low level format on the hard drive. The password also wipes out. This will also result loss of data with the drive formatting. But if the hard drive is supported by any hardware encryption then the process becomes more complicated. Sometime there is a need of hardware modification to get rid of the password. That means manually removing or replacing the hardware supporting encryption on the disk.

BIOS password is a easy cup of tea. That can be removed by removing the cmos battery or bios flash. But hdd passwords are not easy to get rid of. HDD Unlock is a tool which can wipe out the password completely. There are many other similar tools which can do this, but there is no guarantee that every tool will work. There are very rare cases which shows that the software can unlock the drive. You can contact the manufacturer also and ask for the password reset.

For brand like Lenovo it is said already like you need to set two passwords one is master password which is used for reset. Second the password which you provide. If you forgot your password you can use master password. If both of them are lost then the only way to get rid of this is by replacing the disk. There is no way you can get rid of that password.