Where to enter supervisor password?

[brumwald]

So... I went into the BIOS, decided to put some BIOS-passwords on my x60s. Didn't want any password for the harddrive but I wanted to restrict what people could do with the BIOS. The supervisor-password description seemed nice. So I enabled that and entered a password. I also wanted a boot password as well so I enabled a power-on-password as well as enabled "require password after hibernate" which seemed reasonable for my uses.

I saved and after the reboot it asked for a password - fine, no problem there. Next I wanted to do something in the BIOS so I entered the BIOS but discovered that I can't change anything - unless I enter the supervisor password. Thats ok - if only I knew WHERE I'm supposed to enter it? It drives me nuts, it feels as if I've overlooked it but I can't for the life of me figure out where I'm supposed to enter it.

Any pointers?

All google results I get is from people that have lost their password (which I have not) so I haven't had much luck with that.

From the Service and Troubleshooting Guide:

If you have set a supervisor password, the BIOS setup Utlity menu appears after you enter the password. You can start the utility by pressing Enter instead of entering the supervisor password; however, you cannot change the parameters that are protected by the supervisor password. For more infomation, refer to the on-board help.

Heres my proceure:
I boot the computer.
Press F1 to enter the BIOS.
Gets prompted for a password, the supervisor password doesn't work here so I enter the power-on-password
The BIOS appears, in user-mode with no option what-so-ever to enable supervisor mode(?)

[fasterbybike]

If the supervisor password does not work, you must have entered the wrong one. The prompt after F1 is the only place to enter it

[brumwald]

Thanks!

The thing confusing me I guess was partially that the power-on password worked in that scenario, so when the supervisor password didn't work I assumed that I wasn't supposed to work.

And the reason for why it didn't work is because the supervisor password has a weird limit of seven characters, so I only used the seven first characters of the password in mind - problem was that I thought that it really was six characters and not seven, thats why I got it wrong all the time

So thats great, but I'm a little disappointed (aside for the fact that the _supervisor_ password is so limited in length), the description of the supervisor password says that the "Supervisor password prevents unathorized users from accessing these items in BIOS setup: Boot priority lists, Network related items, Date & Time"

Sounds good but if someone wants to alter the boot-priority all they have to do is press F12, and since neither the power-on (or hibernate) password is requested for a restart there is no protection in that scenario.

Anyway, thanks again - I can imagine that it would have taken me some time to figure this out on my own :p

[richk]

If you turn on passphrase, all the passwords can be 64 characters. Clear them all before you turn it on, then set them again

[brumwald]

Thanks

The thing that turned me from activating passphrase in the beginning was that when you try to activate it you get a warning, "If passphrase is enabled, the 3 passwords are stored in secure format. Therefore, you will not be able to swap and use this hard disk with other PCs that do not support the longer, secure passphrase"

I really don't want to lock my harddrive or anything - is the passphrase by any means a combined password or something (just to be sure)? I tried to look it up in the manual but I could only find hardware and maintenance guides.