MacBook Air Firmware Pass / iCloud Lock Removal - LFC#275

[Music] hello interwebs welcome to let's fix computers today i'm going to be doing another firmware password removal video now i've done one of these before on how to get um on how to remove this firmware password from a macbook air or a macbook pro for that matter and this firmware password is activated either when you try and boot from another source or sometimes when you try and start the laptop full stop now just to quickly address the elephant in the room obviously circumventing passwords is always a a dubious task to be doing so needless to say whenever i do this for customers i have always verified that they are the legitimate owners of the laptop there are numerous instances where there are perfectly legitimate reasons to need to do this it could be that some kid has fiddled with the laptop and they've set a password the customer may have just straight up forgotten their own password that happens all the time or failing that might be a relative who has died and they have died with a password-protected laptop full of family photos so there are plenty of legitimate reasons why you might want to do this with that in mind i do always say to people make sure you know who the legitimate owner of the laptop is and when you're buying laptops make sure you're buying from someone who's legit as well anyway let's get to it so um one more thing that i want to point out as well uh watch out in the comments section below it will likely be flooded with bots saying go to this person's instagram he hacked my laptop super fast and super cheap they are all people trying to send you codes for things and it's all a scam don't buy into it i would be trying to delete them but there's like 10 of them a day and i've got better things to do than sit dilly comments anyway right let's turn this thing off the first thing we need to do is remove the motherboard from this and while i do that i'll just tell you a couple of gotchas and things that i have learned since the previous video so number one um we do need to remove the logic board we need to de-solder the firmware chip from this and reprogram it i'm going to use a serial programmer for that which i'll tell you more about in a moment i also need a screwdriver now there are different levels of firmware password on macbooks um and i i don't know fully what the terminology for them is because that's going to vary however the previous video i did was a very basic form of the firmware password and that was literally just um uefi level only and so i was able to drop in a replacement bios chip and that just cleared the board job done however i have also done this on another laptop recently and i went into a world of hurt where it was an icloud lock um and on that one you have to clear the password and you must reinstall macos it's not optional you must reinstall macos um i did try i jumped through lots of hoops to try and save a macos install for someone and it was a world of hurt and suffice to say we're ending up reinstalling macos anyway so yeah make that what you will there is also i believe a sort of a quote-unquote top level um of this where um i think it might be unbipassable however i'm not sure um so suffice to say do watch out and do not assume that this can be done in all circumstances if you're doing repairs make sure that the customer is aware that there is not a 100 success rate on this so i've just opened up this one we've got a third-party ssd with a lot of sticky gunk on it oh well um uh in any in any case oh well uh in any case uh let's break this guy open and get the logic board out so i'll uh quickly zip through this section [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] and out she comes there we go so on the back of the logic board we find the firmware chip or the bios chip bios is technically the wrong word for it these days because it's uefi um bios is obsolete however bios chip uefi chip firmware whatever you want to call it let's take a closer look so here we have an mxic mx25l 6473e um so this is the chip that we need to modify the programming of now you can buy pre-programmed ones of these on ebay and you could just desolder this one and put a new one on which is actually what i did for the previous video and this has pros and cons the advantages is fairly easy and technically it means you could do this job without requiring a programmer however if you do that you're not going to have the correct serial number saved on the laptop um and on the previous one i did this never seems to be a problem i didn't have any issues with that laptop at all but people in the comments did point out ah that's not got the right serial number in it and they're absolutely right so we are going to we're going to program this in a slightly different way so we're going to dump the firmware from this chip modify that and then program it back onto the chip again to make sure that we prefer preserve the serial number and things like that so firstly let's remove this from the board i'm going to use my hot air station for this um and i'm going to add a little bit of flux just to help ease things along [Music] there we go and let's go let's do a little bit of preheating from a distance i'm running my hoss air station at maximum air maximum heat so that's 450 degrees c and just heat the board up a little bit from a distance just to take the chill off of the board and now let's go in and heat for reals and off it comes easy peasy so make a note of the orientation just for your ease um we had the text the correct way up and you'll see that little slot off in the top left that indicates pin one so pin one is in the top left of the chip when the when the writing is the correct way up so i'll just put that chip to one side one moment now in order to program my chip i'm going to put it onto this little breakout board and that's going to adapt this down to a pin header which i can drop into my programmer nice and easily so let's just put that in shot and this thing is already covered in solder and flux and stuff so i don't need to add anything more to it and i'm going to turn the airflow on my hot air station way down and i'm going to drop the temperature a little bit as well because this is a small breakout board we don't need a sledgehammer for this when you're working on a motherboard you need a sledgehammer however when you're working on a tiny little breakout board you do not i should do it it's not perfectly straight but we're on a breakout board who cares now the programmer that i'm going to use is very good at telling you when you have a bad connection to the chip and it will tell you which pin is not connected properly however not all the programmers can do that so sometimes just checking your connections might just help avoid you from getting punked by your programmer when you think it's not working properly and it actually turns out you're not soldered in properly and the program i'm going to be using today is my rt809f serial programmer which is my current favorite one i like this programmer quite a lot i guess i'm very well with this one there are lots of other programmers out there that you could use including the tl 866 ii uh the ezp2019 or edp 2020 or something like that and also another very popular one is this guy here which is a ch341a now this guy is one of my favorites at the moment um i'm this programmer is really cheap it's like five pounds or ten dollars or something like that so this is a really cheap programmer to get hold of however this has a big disadvantage in the um it puts five volts into the chips you're programming now most of the time they'll probably tank that however that's incredibly bad practice to do that in any kind of volume there are modifications you can do to fix this and i'm actually going to make a video on that soon or you can check out youtube for existing videos because i really want to be able to recommend this guy because it's such a cheap and readily available programmer however that voltage mod that's mission critical you got to do that otherwise at some point you're going to melt someone's bios chip not a great look i really wanted to make this video a demo video for this particular programmer but i'm not going to show this guy until i've vault modded it because i know that people are going to be in the comments going ah you can't use that it puts five volts into the chip so yeah that one's for next time today we're using the 809f so as aforementioned this is an mx25l 6473 and is that an e yes 73 e there we go and let's do a read and we'll just save that file as the name of the chip and locked so we know that is the raw dump that we haven't touched so now to edit our firmware file we'll first open the dump so let's open that up and i'm going to search for dollar svs so we'll search that and that brings us to this section here which is at uh 005 9205.0 and what i'm going to do is select that whole section all of this here from the f's back to the f's so all of that down to here and so we've got null data below it and we've got null data above it and we're gonna do file fill selection there we go that's more like it and i'm gonna fill all of that with ff which is just null data nothing zero so as you can see that's all gone red to indicate that's a change we're making and so now i'll save this save as and we shall save it as the file name and unlocked bam there we go so now we have an unlocked version of this file so i'll minimize that go back to my programmer and i will open our modified file so i'll open unlocked so now we've loaded from there so i'm going to go ahead and hit the right and that is going to erase the chip and then it's going to write our new file to it and then we will have a reprogrammed firmware chip there we go looks like we're done and that has done a verification as well so i know that the right was absolutely successful and i'm now ready to pop this guy out the reader and now we'll desolder this from my breakout board and put it back onto the logic board so uh that's not the straightest in the world however in my experience better to quit while you're ahead it's certainly on the board and we'll put this guy back in [Music] [Music] okay connect to check everything has something going into it and i don't have anything left on the bench battery back in now when we turn it on i need to do a very specific sequence with this we do not want it to boot into mac os because if it has an icloud lock on it then icloud will go hey there's supposed to be a firmware password on this and it will set a firmware password again and we'll be back to square one so what we have to do is we have to immediately clear the pram or the nvram whatever it is and then we have to reinstall macos so i'm going to turn on the laptop clear the pram with command option r and p and then i'm going to hold down option to get the boot menu and then i can boot from a mac os flash drive so here we go so power on command option pr and i'm going to wait for two chimes there's one there's two and holding down option and now we're waiting for the boot menu there we go and there's our boot menu so we now passed the firmware password and we're now ready to reinstall macos on this now the reason why i waited for two chimes is um uh just one power cycle is technically all you need however if the laptop was muted the previous time it was turned off it won't chime so the first time you do the power cycle it may not have chart it it probably did start but you won't have heard it cause it might have been muted et cetera et cetera so it's much safer to just wait for two chinese we might have done the pram reset twice then however that doesn't matter but if we've waited for two times we know that it has absolutely taken under all circumstances so that's why i waited that long just to make sure we get it first time right i'm going to grab a macos flash drive plug in my big flash drive and i'm going to select install macos big sir go watch this be too old for big sir all right i've plugged in my uh i've got an msata ssd here that has multiple versions of macos on it um so i would recommend going in with catalina or older big sur was the point where apple started getting real heavy about wanting um icloud logins uh whereas catalina and older are a bit more forgiving so you're less likely to run into trouble with these you shouldn't be looking for old data so we'll boot for that and we should just get the option to just go straight into disk utility where i can then nuke the ssd on this so unfortunately we do have to erase the ssd um otherwise at some point there is a solid chance that the old install of macos will phone home and the macos servers will turn around and go hey that's supposed to have a firmware password on it and it'll lock it back up again so we do need to make sure we erase the ssd to ensure that that doesn't happen um catalina tends to be a bit more forgiving with this big sur will look at the existing ssd and try and uncut and say oh we've got user data here and try and provide recovery options for that user data and we don't want that to happen so we can we want to make sure that we go in with an older version of macos to prevent that after that you can go ahead and upgrade to big sur alternatively given that we've got an m.2 ssd in this you could of course just pull the ssd and erase it from another computer that would also work so i'm going to say english uk and also this this step might not be necessary depending on the level of firmware password that is on the computer however my advice my strong advice is not to risk it and just nukes the ssd i have tried messing around to avoid this and it's not worth the hassle i can tell you that much so i'm going to select view all devices so we can select the very top level ssd and just hit erase and i'm just going to call that mac os erase go and now we can quit disk utility and install macos right and i shouldn't need to guide you through the rest of the installation of macros hit continue a lot of times and one update to big sur later and this thing is now fully up to date as well so past that we're all finished with this thank you very much for watching as always my support links are down in the description below for my twitter patreon discord and instagram and all that stuff or stick around for the end card and i will see you in the next video thank you very much and goodbye you

Channel: Adamant IT

Views: 374,476

Keywords: adamant it, adamantit, computer, repair, shop, custom, gaming, modding

Id: ar37ye4gdOs

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021