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I "cracked" my father's laptop's password when he passed away 15 years ago by buying a similar, broken laptop on eBay for cheap, and unsoldering and switching t
by 1_player 7y ago
I "cracked" my father's laptop's password when he passed away 15 years ago by buying a similar, broken laptop on eBay for cheap, and unsoldering and switching the ROM/EEPROM containing the BIOS.
Probably one of the coolest things I've done as a teenager.
- agumonkey 7y agofearless comes to mind
- bluedino 7y agoYou can buy just the chip on eBay these days. Depending on the model laptop they send you a different chip and they pre-load a BIOS on it for you.
- big_chungus 7y agoWhy re-solder the chip? It seems as though it would be easier to recover data by just yanking the drive, especially since full-disk encryption was quite rare fifteen years ago. Failing that, couldn't you have used a SPI flasher with the existing chip?
- snazz 7y agoSome laptop hard drives have a firmware password you have to enter at the BIOS stage to boot it.
- winternett 7y agoCan't you still just remove the battery on the mother board for a few seconds? I used to do that all the time back when I was a repair tech...
- 1_player 7y agoEEPROMs are non-volatile. They don't need power to keep their data. AFAIK removing the battery just resets the real time clock.
- 1_player 7y agoTo a teenager with only a passing experience with electronics, operating a soldering iron is much easier than learning to flash an EEPROM :-) And I only had one working, locked laptop and a broken one. The whole endeavour was mostly to inherit my father's laptop than to recover any data. What I did with my father's data is probably a story for another time.