I Bought a BIOS-Locked PC. Should You?

oh this looks like a great deal oh it's listed as bios locked well it is cheaper I wonder if I can fix it do I even need to fix it only one way to find out [Music] fall is right around the corner and with that comes busy schedules and less time to make healthy tasty meals you could go with takeout or delivery but that can get expensive and also there's just something nice about having a home-cooked meal which is why we love using hellofresh the sponsor of today's video hellofresh has a ton of variety with 40 Chef crafted meal options each week from family friendly to fit and wholesome you'll never run out of recipe ideas to try I also love how convenient hellofresh is there's no meal planning or grocery shopping required all your ingredients just pop up at your door ready to go the recipes are easy to follow and my wife and I love getting to cook in the evenings together without the hassle of grocery shopping and trying to find new recipes and it gives us more time to focus on what's important if you want to give hellofresh a shot go to hellofresh.com and use code 50 Hardware Haven to get 50 off plus free shipping this fall don't get stuck waiting in the grocery line or drive through you have more important things to do try Hollow fresh instead if you watched the video I did recently covering this HP Elite desk Mini PC you might remember that it was bioslocked when I bought it fortunately I was able to get it completely unlocked and working as expected and I realized that I see these listings somewhat often when browsing eBay often I see these devices listed as four parts with the only issue being the bio stock condition if the solution to this is relatively easy seeking out locked devices may be a way to get better deals on used Hardware so for the next few minutes I'm going to talk about what bios and Power on passwords are and whether or not you even need to remove them then I'll show you how I removed the BIOS password on this HP as well as a few other potential Solutions so first of all what does bioslocked even mean well it can mean a few things typically it means that there is a password needed to access the BIOS settings these are often put into place in large organizations for security purposes as well as just to keep people from breaking things and BIOS with bios passwords you can generally still boot into an operating system as long as the current bios settings allow for it there's also something called a power on password which is basically what it sounds like as soon as the system posts you're presented with a password prompt this locks you out of the BIOS as well as any installed operating systems there's also the possibility that a hard disk password was set but that's a totally different thing and realistically it's probably just easiest to replace the drive most of the time online retailers don't include drives anyway so it's not really that big of an issue now before getting into how to remove bios or power on passwords do you even need to well with a power on password the answer is simply yes unless you just want to use your Hardware as a nice new accent piece bios passwords are a bit different though as long as the current settings work for what you need then there isn't necessarily any reason to change anything but if you need to change the boot order deactivate secure boot enable virtualization or anything else then you'll need to get access to the BIOS settings but how do you remove that pesky password well this gets tricky because Solutions can vary from desktop to laptop and older systems to newer ones but I figured I would touch on a few common Solutions as well as what I specifically did when fixing my HP Elite desk now I should mention that this is not an exhaustive list and I'm definitely not an expert so I would highly encourage you to use some Google Foo and look up instructions or guides specific to the machine you own or might be interested in purchasing one option is that you can contact customer support from the manufacturer and try to have them assist you but typically they either won't help unless you can prove that you're the original purchaser or they might just want you to buy a replacement motherboard for some systems especially older ones you can try just removing the CMOS battery and then holding down the power button and or letting the system sit for a while to clear the CMOS and hopefully the password this typically doesn't seem to work on newer machines though on desktops there's often a jumper or switch labeled past WD or password or something along those lines that you can remove or move to a different position to clear the password usually you need to either power the system on or reset the CMOS while the jumper is repositioned for the reset to take effect if you're trying to work on a laptop there probably isn't a physical jumper but many will give a code after failing to type in the correct password multiple times this code is often just a checksum hash or some other key that can be used to generate either a recovery code or even the original password now I don't own a laptop that isn't a Macbook so honestly I don't have that much experience and I haven't really had a chance to mess around with this much but I'll post some links in the description for some more info fortunately for me I was able to fix the HP Mini PC using the password jumper for some instructions I Googled I removed this small blue jumper labeled past WD and then held down the clear CMOS button I should note though that even with a password reset jumper this won't always work in the Bios of my machine for example there's an option to completely ignore the password jumper and had this been set my fix wouldn't have worked at all so what would I have done in that case well one thing you can always do is just completely reprogram the BIOS chip and even though I didn't need to I thought it would be a fun exercise now I actually did some bios reprogramming in a past video where I fixed some very similar Lenovo PCS two of which had corrupted bioses to fix those I connected this programmer to the BIOS chip of the non-corrupted system dumped the binary to a file and then used the same programmer to flash it onto the two corrupted chips something similar to that could be done in my case to fix the password issue but only if I already had a bios that wasn't locked realistically when it comes to bios flashing the flashing part isn't that hard the real hard part is obtaining the right binary to flash even if you can download the correct bios from a manufacturer's website or another person on the internet it won't have some important data that's specific to your PC such as the serial number Mac address Windows activation key Etc there are ways to modify or hack bios files but that starts getting into a rabbit hole that I just don't want to go down today so instead I just wanted to confirm that I could remove a power on password by flashing a new bios in typical Hardware Haven fashion though what I thought was going to take a single afternoon turned into a nearly month-long endeavor I tried dumping the binary from the BIOS chip like I normally would but discovered that the BIOS chip in the HP was a 3.3 volt chip the programmer I have the ch341a has a notorious flaw where the data pins aren't at 3.3 volts but are instead lifted to 5 volts which isn't good obviously I've only encountered 1.8 volt chips up to this point for those you can just use an adapter so this hasn't been an issue for me until now there is a mod you can perform to bring the pins back down to 3.3 volts but while attempting it I accidentally ripped a pin off of one of the ICS so I decided to order a newer version of the ch341a which has a voltage selector and properly handles 3.3 volts after waiting a few weeks for it to arrive I hooked up this clamp but still couldn't read the chip which was strange because it would work just fine with other chips like the lenovos I had worked on before I did notice that some of the LEDs on the motherboard were lighting up even with the power adapter unplugged and it made me wonder if the chip needed to be removed from the motherboard to work properly so I decided to break out the hot air station and soldering iron fortunately my soldering skills must have improved since the last time I saw it on camera because somehow I was able to desolder the chip and then re-solder it onto an adapter and what do you know it showed up in the software as expected when doing any sort of reprogramming it's always a good idea to save a backup of whatever's on your bios chip even if it's bios locked so I dumped the binary to a file and then verified it just to double check that it was correct and to be clear this dump didn't have the bioslock in place it was just a clean working bios I did manage to find binaries for the 800 G3 mini both using hp's website and directly from some other users but it was only the nine megabytes of the BIOS region not the full 16 megabytes that needed to be flashed to the chip I could have rebuilt the image by replacing the BIOS region of the locked BIOS with the new bios like I said but that starts to get down a deep rabbit hole that I don't want to go into if you do need to go down that rabbit hole I highly suggest this video here from Adam and it as a good starting point for this video to keep things a bit more simple I just decided to use the binary that I already dumped off of my BIOS chip that doesn't have a password to test that my method would work though I re-soldered the chip back to the PC set up a power on password and confirmed the password was working desoldered the chip again re-soldered it to the adapter and then hooked it up to the programmer then I flashed the chip with the binary that I originally pulled off of it and once again re-soldered it to the motherboard I did get an error that the CMOS power had been lost but the system posted and I was able to get into the bios so assuming that I was able to get a clean unlocked bios this fix works now if you don't want to deal with the reprogramming part of things but do feel comfortable soldering you can find pre-programmed chips on eBay although they aren't necessarily cheap so is it a good idea to buy a system that you know either has a bios or power on password in place well it really just depends my recommendation would be to look up the specific model before you buy it to see what options are available and the amount of success that others have had if you'd be saving a good amount of money and you're confident that you have the skills to clear the password then it might be a good way to save a few bucks on your next Hardware purchase if you know of other ways to remove these passwords or have stories you'd like to share I would love to see those in the comments below and maybe like And subscribe while you're down there I mean you've made it this far in the video if you want to know more about how I fixed those Lenovo PCS using the BIOS reprogrammer you can check that video out here that's about it for this one though so as always thank you so much for watching stay curious and I can't wait to see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 551,452

Keywords: BIOS locked PCs, Power-On Password, CMOS battery, BIOS flashing, BIOS passwords, buying used PCs, fixing BIOS locks, BIOS reprogrammer, PC repair, computer repair, computer tips, eBay deals, used computer hardware, refurbished computers, how to remove bios locked pc

Id: jmI88hltohk

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023