Hacking Dell
I recently learned of a cool hack at my new job, pertaining to recovering Dell laptops from a BIOS password protected state. While I don’t use a PC at home, I deal with various PC related hardware all day long, and it’s great to be able to do little tricks like this. Assuming you have a Dell laptop in which you can no longer access the BIOS setup, it may be possible to short out the chip responsible for storing the setting (as well as the Dell Service Tag) and grant access to the previously locked setup. Personally, I’ve done it on several Latitude models, although getting physical access to the chip required completely disassembling the laptop and removing the motherboard. On the bottom of the board, quite often near the RAM slots, is the target 24C02 serial EEPROM. By shorting pins 3 and 6 while powering up the machine, the chip is disabled and the Dell laptop goes into “manufacturer mode,” where the BIOS password no longer exists. I’ve read that the Service Tag data can be re-entered using the ASSET.COM utility, available from Dell’s FTP server. For more detail, you can check out a tutorial I found which no longer exists at the original location, but is thankfully saved at Archive.org. It’s a dangerous, but clever and impressive little hack that just might get you out of a tough spot with a machine that would otherwise be a simple paperweight. I hope to post more hacks like this as I discover them.
January 13th, 2006 at 6:55 am
A slightly more sophisticated way of extracting the cmos password of a dell. This way worked when i tried it. http://dp.allhyper.com/
The shorting method never worked for me.
July 10th, 2006 at 4:29 am
The shorting method works perfectly the first time. But you’ve got to note that the EEPROM also contains the Ethernet controller, and so by shorting and clearing out the EEPROM you effectively render the onboard ethernet port unusable!
I havent found a way to reprogram them.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:25 am
I did find out later that the onboard Ethernet is disabled when following the shorting method, and it was the source of much trouble until I found Dell’s svctag utility. The svctag package comes with a small program called nicset.exe, which re-enables the onboard Ethernet on Latitude and Inspiron laptops which have had their EEPROMs wiped. It works like a charm every time.
September 30th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
in 3 months of searching i have found no one able to answer master password questions about inspiron 700m’s. nearly every other model of dell laptop has a published solution. why not this one? no nvram? it has a serial eeprom. 93c46 microwire. it has a 32 pin PM40fl004T bios chip…. but i know of no one who can say they have solved this mystery. any thoughts?
April 14th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
is there any way to make a dell c640 latitude enable usb boot in bios ? ’cause dell surely wiped that possibility out in all bios versions for latitude c640 series…. maybe you know some hack ?
July 29th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
i can unlock all new DELL laptop like #d420,430,520,530,620…. only by service tag number
chek my page.regards