Friday, December 4, 2009

Omnibook BIOS Reset

A good friend gave me an old HP Omnibook of his, which was used by a former employee and he hadn't used it in well over a year. It turned out to have a BIOS password, which he didn't know.

I thought I was in for some laptop disassembly to remove the CMOS battery or change a jumper; perhaps even worse, to send it back to a repair depot for reset; but it was amazingly easy. 

All that had to be done was hold down the insert key while the system was booting to reset the BIOS back to default. Okay, I had to do this three times before it worked, but it worked.

Although I was relieved to be done with this in just a minute or two, making it this easy to do a reset completely invalidates the security afforded by having a BIOS password in the first place.

Anyhow, it is now happily running Fedora 11; which BTW required 515 updates for 1.6GB (and people complain about Windows updates).

2 comments:

  1. After the reset, what is the BIOS password for the HP Omnibook xe4100? Also, do you know how to get the administrator password?

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  2. It just removed the password altogether on my system.
    And if you're looking to reset a Windows 2000/XP password, I've used WinKey with great success. I think it's at www.lostpassword.com and it resets the password rather than reveals it. The latest version seems to support all versions of Windows. Hope that helps.

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