This week I made a big mistake: I’ve touched a PC again; I’ve been asked by a friend to take care of its notebook to install some additional software on it. At first sight, it wat not a big deal, but…

The computer is a recent Tablet PC thing that my friend get from another person. Apparently the PC was still configured for the previous owner and got passwords from the BIOS to the OS, all different. A paranoid guy.

My friend gave me the passwords I need to know to boot and log on into the computer to do the work. But before going on with the software installs, I was stupid enough to decide to clear all these passwords to ease my friend’s life. I log on into the BIOS to clear the first password of the computer and getting used to that kind of operation, I did it too fast; I didn’t realize that the PC actually has two different passwords for the BIOS: a superuser and a user one.

When I removed the user password and rebooted, the PC asked me for the superuser password; and I didn’t have any clue about what it could be — even not my friend! Well, I said to myself: “what a big deal, I’ll simply locate the CMOS battery and reset all the thing up”. I googled the Internet to get the plan of the board to locate the appropriate chip and then I realized again that my little operation was actually a very big mistake!

Most sites talking about this issue were not very optimistic. Apparently recent notebooks don’t store any password in the BIOS memory but in a specific security EEPROM, very difficult to hack. Worse, when the superuser password is set in the BIOS, it’s likely to have set the harddrive password as well. In that case, the only solution is to send the computer back to the manufacturer for them to remove all passwords. The operation seems to be very expensive. According to an English repair center, removing BIOS passwords (and not harddrive password) is starting at £95. They also said that’s is generally less expensive to change the harddrive completely than to try to reset the password. What the fuck!

Now my only hope is to ask my friend to find this damn password with the help of the previous owner. Believe me! its the last time I touch these fucking things. That ridiculous over-security is getting on my nerves and simply gets more people into trouble than thieves!