I think I've majorly stuffed up.
Having finished configuring a linux dual boot, I set about hardening against hacking thehost...

I have:
1. Set - boot order to start from the hdd first (no rescue CD's)
2. Set GRUB bootloader password (no editing GRUB)
3. Set user and admin passwords in the BIOS

To my surprise - bios asks for a password before booting ... this has never happened before.
So I type in my handy password wot I wrote down. But it isn't recognised.

It is just possible that I have messed this up - how stuffed am I?
(I'll keep hacking the passwords ... are there limits on characters that can be used in bios passwords.)

The bios screen says:
American Megatrends
Released 05/29/2001
AMIBIOS (C) 1999 American Megatredns Inc.'

Gets as far as checking NVRAM, then "Enter CURRENT Password: X" 3 times then nothing. I am presuming the X means an incorrect password.

Maybe if I remove the battery?

Some MB's have a jumper to reset the PW in bios... Removing the Battery for at least 15mins may also clear the PW. You may also try a backdoor PW here:

http://www.freelabs.com/~whitis/security/backdoor.html

KC

Opps

KC

Thanks for that. Sorry took so long to get back.

The motherboard has 2 dip switches and a set of jumpers.
Theres a 6x dip box between the ide and the memory slots, and a 4x box close to the battery. These are sw1 and sw2.

There is a 10-pin jumer block which says "bios write protect 1-2, normal 2-3" on it. No jumpers present. Connecting either pin combination prevents me from entering any passwords but neither disables the passwords.

There is a 5-pin jumper block close to the battery which says "1-2 normal, 2-3 clear cmos" but I cannot see pin numbers. It cannot be following the standard config - otherwise the current setting is either 1-3 or 4-6!

None of the backdoor passwords work.

The cracker links from the site you suggested don't work either - but they won't help me since I cannot boot without the password.

The "cmos clear" thing would appear to be the next thing to play with if there are no suggestions.

I'm trying to get more info on the motherboard - but I can't even lift the heat-sink to find the socket number (there's this almighty spring clamping it down!)

Ideally I should look up the motherboard for the schematics right?

The clear CMOS jumper setting will erase the BIOS passwords plus any custom BIOS settings back to the default. If you can not figure out the jumper setting then removing the battery if possible will accomplish the same thing.

Cool... excellent - I decided to try the jumper in the only logical combinations. All other combinations resulted in no power, so I was releived (at least nothing was broken by so doing). Putting the jumper back, and reboot, gave me an option to load defaults and now everything is fine. whew.

Affero for you two