Episode #42
I don’t want to make this sound too confusing but here’s what happened. I have a Dell Dimension 5150, Intel Pentium 4, Windows XP Home Edition. I set this whole system password on my computer. You need to enter this password in order to even get to the Windows login. To set this password you need to enter the system setup. To get to that menu you need to push F2 as soon as you start up the computer, at the Dell welcome screen. Anyways, I was taking this password off and before I could delete it, I must have accidently hit some keys because it changed on me. In order to delete the password you need to know the current password. I knew the current password but when I went to delete the password, the password I entered didn’t work. It was “incorrect.” I called Dell and asked if they knew anything I could do. All they said I could do was reformat. Couple problems with reformatting though: I have about a year and a half’s worth of music, movies, and pictures that I wouldn’t like to delete. And I don’t have the format disk in the first place. They never supplied one. So I can’t reformat unless I ordered one. Plus I don’t want to reformat, I would rather recover. Would you be able to tell me a way to get around the system password (not to be confused with Windows login password). Or is there a recovery disk that I would be able to order from Dell or something, in order to not lose all my hard drive info? (not much help from Dell) At your mercy.
Trevor, Windsor, ON
Sounds like you’re talking about the BIOS password, which is not on your computer’s hard drive at all — so formatting the machine wouldn’t help, even if you were able to do it! Chances are that you won’t even be able to get to the point where you could reformat the machine, which is good…because it probably won’t change anything besides helping you lose all of your information.
What you want to do is find the way to reset your BIOS password. One place to start is this page, which gives a ton of information on changing your BIOS password using either a hardware solution (a motherboard jumper for example) or using a backdoor password to the BIOS: http://www.tech-faq.com/reset-bios-password.shtml — there’s a good chance that you can change your BIOS back to the default settings simply by clearing your CMOS data, which typically only requires you to move a jumper on the motherboard temporarily.