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Remotely Manage ThinkPad Bios

Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 10:58 pm
by AlexDBall
Hello everyone, i was wondering if there is any application/tool available from Lenovo (or 3rd Party) to remotely manage Thinkpad BIOS. That is because i work for a company and deployed around 200 T61's with Vista and Bitlocker Drive Encryption Enabled.
The laptops were deployed by means of Disk Imaging (Acronis TI) with Lenovo System Update Installed and now we are facing problems with users updating the BIOS and locking the hard drives (Bitlocker). Every user that has updated the BIOS must come to the IT department to unlock the drives using the Bitlocker Recovery Password that we printed/saved during the deployment.

Only if there's an option to disable end users from updating the system's BIOS will do, untill i find out something else! :)


Thanks in Advance!

Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 6:30 am
by RealBlackStuff
If such a tool/software existed, every hacker on the planet would pounce on it!

You may be able to (have Lenovo) suppress a function of the System Updater that stops the users from being able to do a BIOS update from within Windows.

You should have locked the BIOS before you handed out the toys!

Another possibility would be to threaten the users (also in retrospect for those who did it already) to heavily fine them, to the point of firing them!

After all they are messing with company issued computers/laptops!
These users have NO business whatsoever to update a BIOS!

Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 12:32 pm
by AlexDBall
Yeah if such a tool existed then BIOS wouldn't :D

So i just took the manual road as usual and i'm calling in the users, disabling bitlocker, update the bios and re enable bitlocker.

Then i disable the bios update feature in the bios and password protect it. :)

Thanks a lot for your quick reply!