Award bios password removal.

Just picked up an old Hewitt/Rand PC at an auction, it's an AMD 333 with Award bios, start the system and a Bios password screen comes up, tried removing the battery, password is still there, found several backdoor passwords and none of them worked. even pulled the Bios chip and let it sit for a couple O days and it still has the password. Any ideas as to what to try next, haven't tried booting to a floppy yet but will try that tonight, is ther a sofware program that would allow me to bypass or reset this password? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Stu:sad:

There is a little util call killcmos that may work, but before you go trying it, are there any dipswitches on the motherboard?

No switches on the MB, forgot to mention that.

Can you identify the motherboard at all? Is there a model number or an fcc id?

Edit: have you tried these?

Not at the PC right now but those are the Passwords i tried, thanks, will try and post more info about the MB tonight or tomorrow.

Here is killcmos ... should you 'need' it ....

Quote:

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Special Note: KillCMOS will be detected by most anti-virus software as containing a virus, since KillCMOS's primary function is exactly like a virus. Please note that the file is completely safe and Contains NO VIRUS

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... at least that's what it says on pretty much every download site I've seen it offered at ... but be aware that an 'unusual' source might just contain that as a double bluff ! ;) ... but if you don't have any 'critical' data its not that much of a concern ...

You can spend forever looking for 'backdoor' passwords but if someone set it to something unusual like they are supposed to you'll be doing a lot of guessing.

Thanks for all the suggestions, tried booting from disk and that didn't work so i decided to look over the MB again for a switch/jumper to reset the password, none on the MB were maked as "cmos reset" or any variation thereof but there was a jumper close to the bios chip labeled "JP7" which had three prongs, moved the jumper to the last two and started the PC and was able to change the password, shutdown the system and switched the jumper back and it works like a champ.

Again thanks for all the suggestions.

Stu.:)

Long ago, I remember having the pleasure of working on a PC that had a password setup that I could not get around, so I called Award, and got what was then the password to erase all passwords, and it worked.....it was (all caps) AWARD_SW1
just like that......give it a try. Good luck.