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BIOS Passwords Basic settings on your computer such as how many and what kinds of disk drives you have which one are enabled and which are disabled and which ones are used for booting are held in a CMOS chip on the mother board. A tiny battery keeps this chip always running so that whenever you turn your computer off, it still remembers its instructions. A common method of entering the BIOS is pressing the Del key at Bootup other common methods are Ctrl +Alt +Esc and Ctrl + Esc. Most computers have a BIOS which can be configured to ask for a password as soon as the computer is switched on. If the Ask Password option is enabled then as soon as the PC is switched on a Dialog box welcomes you and asks you for the password. You cannot override this and there is no way of disabling this because to enter the BIOS you need to know the BIOS password. So what do you do? Disable it. Now to Disable the BIOS password you need to enter the BIOS. But as soon as you enter the BIOS the BIOS asks for a password. Now the most common method of overriding this password prompt is by trying out the default BIOS passwords. Some common passwords are: Lkwpeter j262 AWARD_SW AWARD_PW Biostar Many BIOS also have their default password that can be tried. "j262" opens most versions of Award BIOS it works about 80% of the time. "AWARD_SW" and "AWARD_PW" work on some computers as well, but much less often. In some BIOS shift+s y x z also works. The best way to find out the default passwords of various BIOS is to search at http://astalavista.box.sk which is the best search engine for security related matter Well if the default passwords did not work them get ready for some serious Hacking stuff. Now as the default BIOS password did not work we will try to reset the BIOS to its default settings so that it asks for no password at all. So to do following: First you have to open the computer and then look for a round lithium battery, it probably looks like a silver coin. So remove the battery and after 30 seconds or so put it back. Some computers may also require you to reset the jumper, so look for a 3-pin jumper and reset it. For example, on most machines you will find a three-pin device with pins one and two jumpered. If you move the jumper to pins two and three and leave it there for over five seconds, it will reset the CMOS. When you boot the machine some BIOS may give an error saying that the BIOS was reset or tampered with, but that is not such a big problem

WARNING: Messing with the CMOS chip and the jumper is more dangerous than editing system files. So do everything with utmost caution.

There's a pretty lame solution to the BIOS password problem. It's a program called KillCMOS which you can download from http://www.koasp.com. or if can’t find it there search for it at http://astalavista.box.sk There are also a number of CMOS password crackers available on hacker Web sites. But using other doesn’t make you feel that you are hacking a computer and it is really lame to use someone else’s software for hacking and calling yourself a hacker.