How to find or bypass passwords

[ojisan]

Thank you Everyone for the help!
Update:
The computers are on their way to Minnesota right now.
Another relative has flown in, grabbbed them, and will take care of this.
Hopefully all goes well.

I am very gratefull for all the PMs and offers of assistance.
There are some mighty fine people here on CalGuns.

[stilly]

For the record.

It is important to know WHAT kind of passwords are needed. If this was a toshiba satellite (SP) and there was a lock on the bootup, then NONE of these would work because you can not get into the setup and you can not get into the hard drive. Taking it out of the system would render the drive a paperweight as it is a FIRMWARE issue that will LOCK it so you can not hook ANYTHING up to it and retrive anything from it. I had to break into a toshiba one night for someone at work. I had a passcode and I had to enter in a challenge code TWICE mind you and only THEN was I able to get into windows.

BTW, there was nothing cool on that system. Not even any good porn

[JDay]

For the record.

It is important to know WHAT kind of passwords are needed. If this was a toshiba satellite (SP) and there was a lock on the bootup, then NONE of these would work because you can not get into the setup and you can not get into the hard drive. Taking it out of the system would render the drive a paperweight as it is a FIRMWARE issue that will LOCK it so you can not hook ANYTHING up to it and retrive anything from it. I had to break into a toshiba one night for someone at work. I had a passcode and I had to enter in a challenge code TWICE mind you and only THEN was I able to get into windows.

BTW, there was nothing cool on that system. Not even any good porn

WRONG! You're confusing a BIOS password with a HDD password. They are different things. The BIOS password only prevents people from making changes to the BIOS setting and usually is used to prevent people from booting from CD/DVD/USB (common way to break into a system). A HDD password locks the drive and there are ways to remove them, although doing so usually causes you to lose all data on the drive. There are also ways to read the password off the drive if it is not a drive that has built in encryption (FDE) since setting the HDD password in that case encrypts the drive.

http://hackaday.com/2011/02/18/hard-drive-password-recovery/