CMOS Passworded ? ? ?

[HC1Gunner]

I recently bought a barely used Dell Precision M4300 from a company via eBay. The laptop was a great deal price wise, there wasn't a mark on it anywhere, and it works like a charm. I wanted to change the boot sequence of one of the drives, and enable the Bluetooth. When I went into "Setup" I discovered it had an admin password, and it was locked down. I opened panel on the back where the memory is located, there was small circular flat battery in shrink wrap with a lead connecting to the mobo, I presume. I unplugged it, and sure enough the date & time was changed, so I thought I had reset the BIOS, but everything still required an admin PW. I then got the idea of flashing the BIOS, which is something I never do unless a problem would be resolved from doing so. After the successful flash, the settings where still locked down with a an admin PW. Company that I got from has no idea where it came from and of course no idea what the PW is.

I don't have a lot of experience taking laptop chassis apart, but I've heard that some laptop mobo's have a separate reset switch on them?

Does anyone have any idea of how I can get rid of the BIOS admin password?

[Darthtanion]

Try removing the CMOS battery for a couple of days. I know that some of the older motherboards would remove it when this trick was done, and your laptop may be another candidate. From the way it sounds, it certainly can't hurt. Might also be a good idea to make sure the laptop battery itself is also removed and it is not plugged in... no power whatsoever.

Good luck.

[Lsdmeasap]

And then if no luck, try the obvious passwords
God/god
Admin/admin
Administrator/administrator
Password/password
Pass/pass
123456 or 1234
Dell/dell