Hello, I have an Inspiron 9300 for over 1 1/2 years ago and never had any problem with it. Recently I created a HDD Password that prompted me to enter the password whenever the system started up. My son got a hold of the Laptop and I forgot to tell him about the HDD Password. I don´t know that he did, but now I´m unable to get into my laptop, I´m given 3 attempts at entering the password and then the system shuts down automatically.
The HDD Password and the Administrator Password are the same. What I have done so far is to remove the Cell Coin battery from the system board in order to reset the BIOS but I´m still promted to enter the password. I cannot get into the BIOS Setup I cannot even flash the BIOS since I cannot boot from the CDR-CDRW. Any ideas as to what must be done. Thanks in advance.
If you have regularly backed up your data:
You say you cannot boot from the CD/CDRW ... was this using the restore disks that came with the computer, too? You may be able to create a boot disk with a pasword picking program. Check www.majorgeeks.com to see if there is one for your os among the utilities tools that may be worth a try if the boot sequence is cd drive first. Also try googling password restore and your os on the web.
Install a different primary hard drive, and then use the present one as a slave. Once it is a slave, you may be able to transfer data from it, or reset the password on it some how.
Hopefully other readers will chime in, too.
David
I doubt it's an HDD password, it's probably a CMOS password.
On some Dell laptops, there's a chip you have to short out while booting it, and there's no actual pins for you to put a jumper on it. Dell does NOT want people resetting the passwords, so it's not well documented.
I found this really poorly written how-to while googling for it.
http://www.darkmagic.org/mike/dell-tag/dell/dell.html