Please help

First bear with me as i have zero knowledge of linux.

A girl in work got an HP2133 notebook at christmas and between her and her husband have managed to get locked out / cant get by the username/password fields.

She gave me it home to look at it. I thought it was Windows otherwise i would have said i have never used Linux.

After searching i have discovered there are 2 possible password - the BIOS one and your own ?

Anyway i am no further forward. I have the recovery disk but cannot get the machine to boot from the disk basically as i dont know how to.

Have never used a netbook before - i dont even know if the cd drive is working - but it does light up and i cant get the disk in or out unless its switched on so it must be

I think i have managed to get to the boot options page. When i selected the one that appears to be the connected cd drive nothing seems to happen. It always boots from the hardrive and im back at enter username and password

I have searched the box and checked the instruction disc as i assumed the thing must have came with an original password ? Cant see anything

I have disconnected the battery and pressed F10 but again cant get past the current password request

Can someone give me an idiots guide how to get any further

It would be much appreciated

Ally

When you are initially starting the computer, do you hit the F10 key and get into the BIOS (or setup)? If so, there should be an Advanced tab you can highlight with the arrow keys on your keyboard. Highlight it, hit enter key and you should see Boot Option choice.

I'm not understanding if you are getting a password request when entering the BIOS or after booting to the OS login??

You might try setting factory defaults in the BIOS.
I believe the HP2133 comes with Suse Linux? you have a Recovery Disk for it?

Thanks for replying Yancek

When i hit F10 i get "Enter CURRENT Password andi can get no further

When i press F9 i get boot device menu

The option is there for the CD (i think) - the three options are;

USB TEAC CD-224E (which i believe is the CD rom that ive put the recovery disc in

Notebook Hard Drive

Notebook Ethernet

No matter what i select it boots up the usual way and im asked for username and password

When i press F10 im asked for enter current password as i said above

Please verify: The owners lost the password(s) and have asked you to fix it.

From your last post, it sounds like the BIOS setup has a password. I don't know any way to fix that except resetting the BIOS. I'm pretty sure this requires opening the computer, but I would check with HP before trying anything.

Regardless, you do not need the BIOS password to boot up (only to change BIOS settings).

To recover the root and user passwords, the normal routine is to boot into "single-user" mode. When you start the computer, do you get a screen offering a choice of systems (or kernels) to boot---or perhaps just one choice plus things like memory check, recovery, safe mode, etc.?

Tell us what exactly you see on startup, and we can give more specific help

Thank Pixellanny

On start up i have the black HP screen and at the bottom there are three choices but there is not much time to select them

F9 Boot Device Menu - no matter what i select it boots from default
F10 Rom Based Set up - which im asked for a password
F11 Net Boot - not connected to the net but it boots the usual way when i select that anyway

That is all - but the machine quickly boots up with nothing else to offer - i get the Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop blue screen with the white line loading

I am then asked for Username

The four choices at bottom are Language/Session/Reboot/Shut down

Yes the owners have either lost the passwords/usernames or have forgotten the combinations

OK....
This will be fixed by booting from any Linux Live CD---You indicate that you could not boot from your recovery disk.....If that's true, then try any other bootable disk---and/or try booting your recovery disk in another computer. (We need to get you booting from CD before we can do anything else.)

If you cannot get it to boot from any CD, try calling HP. (There is one other option, but it is invasive....)

For the BIOS password reset, unless you wanna disassemble the laptop yourself, you have pay HP to reset it. It's not covered under warranty.

As for Suse, you can check out these instructions on resetting the root password.
Once you get to a root command line, you can basically reset any password with the passwd command.

To see what's your username:
# cat /etc/passwd
Hint: It's usually the last line.

To reset the username:
# passwd yourusername

I gave her the Notebook back and she called HP support.

The optical drive she had was a CD drive

The recovery disc is a DVD - DOH !

She bought a DVD optical drive and the recovery disc booted

I'll stick to my desktop with combined DVD/CD drive where these problems wont occur

Thanks for your help and this thread can now be closed

Apologies

Ally

I have the same mini note book, my settings were,
username:root
Password: jasmine
that was the factory settings from hp,I understand the username is always root, and i know of one other machine with that password so maybe the flower connection will give you some ideas?

failing that i have no idea, sorry. maybe if you carry out a live usb update? but watch out as i am having network problems on the new Opensuse 11.2.. but that might just be me..lol