Thinkpads Forum

Hello there. I recently received my new lush T-60 and booted it up to find an array of bollocks pre-installed for me. After deciding to clean install, the first thing i did was flash the bios to the latest edition.

I then entered the bios and config'd it, and out of habbit, set a bios access password (not supervisor or power on).

After changing the SATA mode to compatability, i disabled the service partition as I decided I had no use for it. I booted XP install, deleted all partitions (including that secure R drive whatever it is), and started with one C 100GB NTFS.

After booting Windows, i installed that Intel Matrix Storage thing, and then tried to access the BIOS again to switch back to the other setting (not compatability, the one on the Lenovo site) however my password isnt recongnised. There is no way ive forgotten it or mistyped it as I only entered it 60mins before trying to get back in, but for some reason it's not accepting it. I guess this would come under 'forgotten password'.

How can I gain access back to my bios? I've looked around and I can see the whole passwords affair with hadware/bios is a right game.

Can i do some magic with a recovery CD to restore my laptop to factory..will this erase the bios to factory also?

The laptop functions fine but i don't want to be locked out my bios for the rest of time.

thanks.

If it's just the BIOS password I believe you can still pull the main and CMOS batteries, let it sit for a bit, then put them back in. Check the Hardware Maintenance Manual for ytour machine, it usually has instructions for clearing the BIOS password.

Before you do that though, did you set a password or a passphrase? There are different rules for each as far as special charcters, case sensitivity, length, etc. If thought you set a passphrase with 15 upper and lower case letters but you were in password mode at the time, you may have actually set a 7 character upper case password. So try the first 7 characters of your password in uppercase only, or variation on that theme.

Ed Gibbs