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

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