Notebook BIOS needs resetting

[Slade]

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

[Catweazle]

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.

[Slade]

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

[Catweazle]

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.

[Slade]

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.

[Slade]

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?

[Catweazle]

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.

[Slade]

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.

[Catweazle]

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.

[Slade]

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

[Slade]

Well, I think it overheated, I'm not sure. I went into the bios system setup, was there for a couple of minutes, then the screen went blank. I reset and the screen remained blank. The cpu was pretty hot too so I don't know what happened. To my knowledge all fans were functioning. There is no response from the computer whatsoever when I turn it on. No screen, nothing from the keyboard, it's just dead. But it still turns on, what happened?

Slade

[Catweazle]

Dunno mate.

You're really getting into "Could be anything" territory there! If you changed any more of those switches, change 'em back and see what happens.

[Slade]

No, I hadn't changed any more, just the on one. Perhaps I should change more? Couldn't hurt right?

[Catweazle]

You're really getting into "Could be anything" territory there!

I guess nothing can hurt if it doesn't matter that you blow the thing up. I'd be seeking tech advice from Acer before I proceeded though ;)

[Slade]

lol it's not that big of a deal really, it has a 466MHz cpu for crying out loud. It's absolutely old, and damaged at that. the notebook case is cracked and basically rotten, someone from our longreach branch found it in their car after so many years so they gave it to me to fix, since the other techs had no idea what to do anyways. So I just did anything, they said they didn't care if it broke AND a bonus to it breaking is I may just be able to flog some of the RAM and some other parts for my own notebook lol.

[Slade]

But still, I feel bad that I had overcome one obstacle but didn't acheive my ultimate goal :(. I love the sense of achievment but the sense of failure has exactly the same magnitude of effect except opposite to achievment :(. It bites.

[Slade]

I think I should mention here that my failure teaches us all how careful you must be with a pc. Do surgeons play around with body parts they don't know about when they are operating? No, they know exactly what they are doing and what the procedure should be. In most cases. The same should be with a PC, you shouldn't screw around and rough house them in any way, inside or out. Just thought I'd let you all know, when operating on a pc, make sure EVERYTHING is in order before switching it back on.

Just didn't want you guys to make the same mistakes I did :)

Cheers,

Slade

[TheOgre]

There's a few freeware utilities that you can stick on a boot disk to reset/wipe BIOS passwords. I have a few on my laptop, and I'll post them in the next few days, if you still want/need them Or, do a search on Google for "bios reset" and have a look.

[Slade]

yeah, I tried them ones, but the password came up before anything booted, which is why I had to frig around with the dipswitch heh :). By the way I'm registering my very own domain tomorrow, expect to see a nice website from me soon with a link straight to here :D

[TheOgre]

*nod*

If you're going to register a .com domain, you can do it for about $7 at my site: http://njcs-online.net/register.html
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