old busted up laptop

[brendan3eb]

So I have an old busted up toshiba labtop from the 90's, and I came up with the idea of using it to store backups of websites since its too crappy for me to really use. I turned it on and it wouldn't get past the screen with the red toshiba text, instead in this area by the media player at the front (a tiny tiny blue screen) the text 'HDDPassword' shows up. I'm not sure what it means I start typing text and I see astericks appear in the blue screen as I type. I try typing one of my passwords for the computer and hitting enter to see if that gets me past the screen I'm stuck on, but instead the computer turns off right away when I hit 'enter'. I've tried hittin F1, F10, and F12 to get to safe mode, but no luck. Does anyone know what I should do? and if I don't figure this out, is there anything worth taking from the labtop's inside to sell or should I just dump it?

[encyclo]

The machine is probably protected by a password in the BIOS. These are hard (but not impossible) to get around: you can search for "backdoor" passwords that exist in certain BIOS programs (no I won't tell you where to look!), or you can open up the case and remove the little battery on the motherboard which powers the BIOS chip - leave it off for 15 minutes and the BIOS should lose its settings.

If you don't succeed, then send the machine for recycling. :)

[brendan3eb]

where is the little battery? what does it look like? will it be likely to have any lables on it? what color is it?

I've unscrewed alot of stuff looking for anything that will it is the bios battery, haven't found anything that I'm confident of. Do you think I'd be charged if I went to a computer store and had a guy take it out for me? if so, how much?

Thanks for all the help,
Brendan

[brendan3eb]

I did find what looked like a password on one huge green chip. The first 8 characters where a combo of uppercase letters and numbers, then there was one space, and a number. I tried entering it as a password and then the little blue screen just froze instead of shutting down or going back to HDDPass=.

I'll give you more of a picture of what I've looked at tommorow, once again, thanks for all the help!

[SEOMike]

what does it look like?

It should look like a watch battery. Flat and round.

[Rimpy]

Try your luck by calling up toshiba support they will have a master password for the BIOS or HDD. If they fail recycle is the best option.