Seeing as I work in technology, that obviously means I’m the first port of call for friends/relatives with any kind of computer issue.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my wifes friends asked if I could take a look at her lappy – a Dell D610.

She hadn’t used it for a few years as she got a newer lappy, now couldn’t remember her password which left her husband SOoL when he wanted to take it with him whilst he’s away with work.  To make things a little less straight forward, there were a bunch of photos on it of their kids when they were younger, so I couldn’t simply reinstall the OS and go.

Getting the pics off was pretty easy – Re-Installing the OS was not.

I managed to get the photos off with my trusty 3.5″IDE->USB adaptor.  Took the disk out, hooked it up to my MBP and copied them off.  Well, it wasn’t quite that simple as I didn’t realise OS X wouldn’t search an NTFS drive (probably something to do with spotlight writing the index but being unable to write to NTFS natively).  After a bit of driver wrangling, I managed to get the device to show up in Windows 7 under VMWare Fusion and quickly found the pics.

Right, just the OS to go.

I burned an iso of XP with SP3 slipstreamed in and went about trying to get the lappy to boot from CD.

Once I realised that the boot menu was having no effect, I checked out the BIOS.  Yup, completely locked out with an admin password.  This meant I couldn’t change the boot priority or anything at all.

Bugger.

A bunch of Googling turned me on to a method of wiping the BIOS admin password completely by shorting out the EEPROM.

It took me a while to work it out and I absolutely refused to pay the jackass with the youtube video promising to show you how to do it for a fee.

So, in the interests of freedom of information, here is how to clear/reset/remove the BIOS password on a Dell D610.

Notes and disclaimer:

This worked for me.  If it doesn’t work for you, i’m not responsible for that.
You will be cutting metal from the casing.  You need to be careful not to leave any residue on the motherboard incase it shorts anything out.
As part of the process, your machines service tag details will also be cleared.

1. Get your BIOS locked Dell D610.

2. Get a paperclip or safety pin.

3. Get a phillips or crosshead screwdriver and some metal cutters (heavy duty wire cutters should do it).

4. Remove the power supply, battery, CD drive and HDD.

5. Unscrew pretty much all of the screws on the bottom of the D610.

6. Remove the bottom case.

7. With the rear of the laptop closest to you, you should see a white label covering the modem on your left.  There should be some black plastic covering which stops the CMOS from touching the motherboard.

8. Just above that, there are some holes in the metal casing. You need to access a chip underneath that area.

9. CAREFULLY remove the metal.

10. Take your paper clip and prepare to short out the two pins 2nd from the left.

11. Connect the power supply and power on whilst shorting out those pins for about 5 secs.

12. If you are doing it right you’ll hear the fan kick in.

13. This message will then show on the screen.

14. You can either press FN+x or let it reboot on it’s own..

15. Now you will be able to go to the BIOS (Press F2) and make whatever changes you need.

16. Reassemble the case

It’s actually a pretty simple process once you know what chip is where, although you must be extremely careful when cutting the casing.

I hope that helps someone and saves them a few bucks.

//ian

No related posts.

It simply hooks into the iPod functionalit and submits the Artist, Track and Album information to my Last.FM profile. Having been an avid, subscribing scrobbler for nigh on three years now, I can’t bear to listen to anything that doesn’t get posted to my profile. I’m very OCD about it; no CDs in the car (my HU has a ‘Made for iPod’ interface), no radio, no net streaming (except for the last.fm client).
It’s therefore been a bit of a struggle moving away from my iPod to _just_ the iPhone.

The current last.fm client isn’t able to scrobble iPhone plays in the same conventional manner that it does for iTunes or iPod plays. Apparently the way an iPhone syncs is completely different to iPod classic.

Anyhow, MobileScrobbler not only does this for you, it also does it over Edge/GPRS so it’ll scrobble in real time, on the move. Network permitting of course. (If it can’t scrobble it keeps the tracks in a cache until it can).

Simply brilliant, I can’t wait to get time to see what other goodness is available through Installer.

[EDIT]  I just checked out the dev guys blog, he’s almost got the whole Last.fm client functionality down including the streaming and last.fm wiki integration.

Here are the the first couple of tracks I put through MSc.

Uploaded with Skitch!

[tags]iphone, last.fm, scrobble, MobileScrobbler, music, Stereophonics, Paramore[/tags]

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1. A more objective look at iPhone (part 3: A few more words)
2. Quick iPhone wish list
3. Rolling back from Outlook 12 (2007 beta release 2)

I thought i’d write this up as I couldn’t find anything specific to say that the o2 iPhone could / has been broken. So here is my quick guide. The jailbreak operation took about two hours, including downloading both 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 firmwares and the aforementioned 15 minutes of shakiness – mostly due to having to Google a lot, just for my own sanity! Fixing the Edge and VVM settings was another 30 minutes.

Usual disclaimers apply, if you brick it that’s your too bad. On with the show.

1. Download the 1.1.2 jailbreak (112JB) kit from concieted software.

2. Download the 1.1.1 firmware from appldnld.apple.com… (official Apple download site, direct link).

3. Connect iPhone to Mac, hold down Power and Home buttons until iTunes pops up with this prompt.

Uploaded with Skitch!

4. Press the ‘alt’ key (apparently AKA Option key) and hit restore, this should open up a dialogue for you to choose the 1.1.1 firmware you downloaded from Apple. Once that finishes you’ll get a 1015 error prompt from iTunes and another Recovery Mode prompt. Ignore that.

5. Run Jailbreak.jar from the kit and use Boot from Recovery. I sat about for 15, sphincter clinching, minutes. The progress bar didn’t complete and the phone wouldn’t reboot. I thought i’d bricked it. The solution was to close iTunes (it took a while to close) and THEN run Jailbreak.jar. Without iTunes it literally took a couple of seconds before it rebooted. You can quit the Jailbreak.jar instance now.

6. Open Safari on the iPhone, join a Wireless network and browse to www.jailbreakme.com and choose “Install AppSnapp” at the bottom of the page. This adds the Installer.app icon to the iPhone home. Open it up.

7. At the bottom of Installer there are 5 icons, choose Install / Tweaks 1.1.1 / Oktoprep and then hit Install.

8. You’ll now see a Notice “You are now ready to perform the “Update” to 1.1.2 and continue with the TouchFree process.”. Open iTunes.

9. Selecting iPhone in the menu, you can hit Continue to restore your settings and wait for the iPhone to reboot.

10. Now iTunes will display the usual iPhone screen (see below) and start to sync up your content. I stopped it as I have a lot of shit to sync and it’s 01:15. Hit the Update button to start downloading the 1.1.2 firmware. It’s 160MB..

Uploaded with Skitch!

11. Once the iPhone reboots again, iTunes will start to update to 1.1.2. Apparently if you have hit Restore instead of Update you will have to start from the very beginning again.

12. Now, once the 1.1.2 update has installed and the iPhone is rebooted again, activation will succeed and you’ll see the shiny “Activation has completed” notice on your iPhone. You’ll notice that Installer.app is no longer on your home page.

At this point, i’ve had my contacts, notes, recent calls and text messages restored. Brilliant! Although visual voicemail doesn’t appear to work.

13. Run Jailbreak.jar again, this time selecting ‘install ssh’ and setting a decent r00t password. (I wonder how many people left it set as Alpine?!) The Jailbreak app is a lot more verbose this time around, Installing the ssh components, Reading flash image and finally Writing flash image. I felt a lot more secure in it this time..

14. The first time it reboots (again) I got the same alert from iTunes about recovery mode (as above) and it just hung again, as before. Closing iTunes, quiting Jailbreak, restart Jailbreak and choose “Boot from recovery” sorted that. 2 more automatic reboots and my iPhone is up, with installer and ssh installed on the home page.

Inbound and outbound calls work, as do texts. Still no Visual Voicemail though, nor Edge. A 15 minute stint on Google, trying different Edge username/password credentials (none of them work) and I stumbled on the following. (I’ve lost the link now, will try and dig it out tomorrow)

I installed BSD Subsystem from the Installer.app and ssh’d in using the root credentials set in Jailbreak.
Moving the following files around sorted the problem.

<Start>

rm /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.carrier.plist

ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreTelephony.framework/Support/O2_UK.plist /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.carrier.plist

rm -f /var/root/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

<end>

One final reboot and Edge was back along with Visual Voicemail.

As a final note, I’ve also downloaded the 1.1.2 firmware from the Apple download site (Direct Link), i’m going to give my iPhone a restore tomorrow to make sure it goes back to the ‘official’ version. Just in case.

So, that’s it. A Jailbroken 1.1.2 UK 02 iPhone. Hopefully I’ve got some good keywords in here for search engines to index. As I mentioned earlier, information for UK specific jailbreaking is pretty thin on the ground.

[tags] iPhone, Jailbreak, 02, UK, Apple, Edge, Visual Voicemail[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Quick iPhone wish list
2. A more objective look at iPhone (part 2: Things the iPhone does well)
3. A more objective look at iPhone (part 1: Things the iPhone can't do)

Whilst trying to find something useful and interesting to do with my new old-skool style PSP I stumbled across the OE (Open Edition) custom versions of the OR firmware, released by a chap with the moniker Dark Alex.
I’m now running his 3.10OE-a release which enables a number of cool things i’ve found and a number of cool things I *think* it can do .

The actual upgrade process was simple, the hardest part was getting the right information and the right versions of the s/w. A lot of forum jumping and post trawling was involved, unfortunately most of the good information was buried amongst, people I assume are under the age of 15, writing “cud u pls hlp me make my PSP play copied games cuz i dont no how” – damn that kind of writing really is one of my biggest hates.. (Not to say that I am a Shakespearean literary genius.)

Disclaimer – If you brick your PSP it’s not my fault, just enjoying having the best paper-weight in your office.

Firstly, I couldn’t run the upgrade until my battery was fully charged – Even though it was connected to the PSU. Annoying.

*Stops*

Ok, I found the info that I was about to type up online already. This would have been helpful yesterday!!

After downgrading to 1.50, follow the guide below.
NB. I didn’t know about the motherboard limitation whereby later versions of PSP are hardcoded not to accept firmware lower than 2.0.. There is a link to a downgrader for this issue too but I did not need it.. (I have one of the earliest Jap import models )

http://www.gamerspress.com/index.php?title=3.10_OE-A_Install_Guide

I wonder if it’s possible to run *nix on a PSP yet….

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1. Halfway up the down

Every since I got my PSP, i’ve always kept the firmware up to date – for no other reason than I like having the latest and greatest. I don’t know why.

So, after following the instructions HERE I’m back down from 3.x firmware to a 1.5.

Now just need to work out what to do with it!!

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I’ve been meaning to find out how to remove the search box from IE7 for a month or so now and have just gotten around to it.

HKCU\Software\Polices\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\

Create new key InfoDelivery
Create new key under InfoDelivery called Restrictions
Create new DWORD under Restrictions called NoSearchBox with value = 1

Restart IE7 and voila, no built in search box.

Will getting a Macbook help my cluttered desktop woes I wonder? (Yes, i’m still fishing for ways to convince myself I NEED one :p)

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1. Rolling back from Outlook 12 (2007 beta release 2)

Now, when opening an existing Outlook profile the app terminates when trying to access the profile settings (you get the lovely ‘do you want to restart in safe mode’ and ‘would you like to detect/repair’ loop going.
Trying to create a new Mail profile (either from the Outlook dialogue or from the Mail applet) resulted in this error:

There was an error locating one of the items needed to complete this operation. It might have been deleted.

Kind of makes sense I guess, the profiles were created in OL12 which was removed but the question is, how the hell do I get out of that loop?

Looking through the registry, the uninstall hadn’t removed the 12.0 keys from

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0

..so I got shot of them, still no dice.

The last thing I checked was Mapisvc.inf – both versions in system32 and %program files%\Common Files\MSMAPI\1033 were identical and hadn’t been modified since i’d installed OL12. Bingo. Once I deleted both of them, the next start of Outlook recreated the files and everything is swimming now.

Lets hope MS remember to clean up a little better in the RC and Gold versions

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1. Removing the search box from IE7