Hey guys,

The company has recently found one of their old notebooks that seems to have been lost for quite some time in one of our vehicles. This is all good and dandy, except nobody can remember the bios password for it. The model is an ACER Travelmate 514t and I cannot find any backdoor passwords for it at all. The only options I can think of is removing the CMOS battery or using the jumper or dipswitch settings. Except I have no idea where to start!!! I will try but a hurried reply would be great lol. THanks heaps guys!

Slade

If you know how to remove the CMOS battery for a while, that should do the trick. Otherwise, see if the manual is still available for download from Acer and that should have instructions for resetting CMOS in it.

how long is a while? Because I just left it for 5-20 minutes and that didn't do it

Weird? That should have been enough, try leaving it out overnight and see what happens. I just checked the documentation on Acer's website and it's not helpful. You might need to submit a technical support request to them if no-one here comes up with a working solution.

Lol, I did that first, my bad I should of had more faith in you guys. Yeah, I thought I will leave it out overnight, other than that I'll have to try resetting it via Jumper :cry:. I'll look up more. Thanks for your help catweazle.

I have found the jumper or "dipswitch" whatever, what do I have to do there to reset the bios?


There are 4 switches, labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4 no. one says "ON" the others say KHS04

does that help?

Not without me having access to technical documentation, it doesn't, and I'd suggest you not change those settings until AFTER you've confirmed what they are. Otherwise you might end up disabling or damaging the unit.

If you don't have success with your Technical request to them, PM me. (Sometimes the IT media can get answers where customers don't) No guarantees, but I'm happy to try.

well that's just dandy, I finally reset BIOS (if you're wondering, it was by changing the switch that said on) and now there is a freaking HDD password, what do I do?!?!?!

P.S. Sorry catweazle, I didn't read your post until after I'd done that lol, a billion apologies for my ignorance.

If the HDD password is a BIOS one, you should be able to get back into BIOS setup and change it. Edit: oops, maybe not. You'd probably need the password to change it. Perhaps it's a different switch?)

If its a Windows thing, you could easy just format and Install Windows again to clean everything up.

lol, it's a bios thing, but don't worry I screwed the whole machine by overheating it. Tis all good though, no-one went nuts abuot it. It was a hunk of junk anyways. Perhaps I can save some parts.

Thanks for your trouble

Slade