BIOS password trouble
 

A friend of me locked his laptop completely by setting a bios password.
The laptop is an "acer travelmate 2201WLC".

I do have the password but that doesn't help me since I can't even access the keyboard. Nothing boots at all, it just shows a password screen.

I assume this means I need to open it?
That doesn't seem to work either.
Some screws simply can't be removed (so far).

I've tried googling for a (hardware) manual but can't find that either.
Any suggestions?

PS: I did mail global.acer.com, but they didn't respond.

External Keyboard
 

Have you tried using an external keyboard?

Yes.
It does seem to recognize everything, but the password keeps blocking any input.

You can try to find a factory password or you can reset CMOS or remove CMOS battery and wait. Though I don't know if there will be some problems with resetting cmos on a laptop.

Well, a factory password wouldn't work since I can't access anything to insert it (I would use use debug if I had access)...
Removing all batteries is actually what I'm trying to do, but I can't open the damn thing. Some screws just don't appear to be removable...

I can't seem to find(google) a manual for this model either.

It sounds to me like there's more problems to this machine than a simple password. If you are unable to enter the password using either the onboard, or external keyboards, there's something bigger wrong.

What is your indication that there is no keyboard input? Does your laptop allow you to press a key to access the BIOS, then prompts you for the password?

It doesn't allow any input (I tried to access it with an other system as well).
It shows the password screen even before the bios interface...

I finally did find some info.

As I already mentioned it's not mine(it's from a friend's 13 year old son) so don't really know what happened with it.

It seems Acer has some weird security tool called eService, so I'm guessing that's what blocking everything:
https://www.synapsenow.com/synapse/d...UserManual.pdf

Support from acer seems to suck badly (I guess that's why they didn't reply my mail):
http://www.tech-faq.com/acer-bios-password.shtml

This thing is really hard to open but that does seem to be the only way.

I did finally found a way to remove those annoying screws (you had to turn them in the opposite direction).

I'll try removing the CMOS batteries tomorrow (I really need some sleep now).

........double_post.........

I suppose, it should beep or print a message like "keyboard error" if something goes wrong with keyboard. Since that isn't mentioned, it's possible that it is not the case.

Right, I agree. But as the OP said earlier, it doesn't even get to the BIOS screen before prompting. It depends on how Acer's BIOS is written, also.

This site may offer some help.
http://www.elfqrin.com/docs/biospw.html

One other option to consider would be to remove the hard drive from the laptop, put it into a USB enclosure, and access the data that way. Obviously that doesn't solve the BIOS password issue, but you can get to your data

Well, it's not really the data that matters.
This laptop is from a 13 year old who bought it with his own money(and that's a lot for a kid). This kid really felt bad for breaking it...
Thank you for the suggestion though.

I did get some very useful info from a nice hardware/laptop forum:
I did find those (_very_ small) contacts under that sticker.
I'd still like to remove the battery cause that always works and can't fry your system.

If it really doesn't open, I will short those contacts though.

Update
 

Since Acer kept refusing to give any info on how to open the damn thing, I did what Hairy_Lee recommended.
I had to short it three times before the CMOS managed to reprogram itself.
After that it all just worked again (no data loss either).

PS: I was happily surprised to see this 13 year old kid was actually dual booting winXP and Fedora Core 6 (his father never mentioned this) :)