BIOS Lock. Not sure if it's worth the salvage

[pentium]

Yay. Another BIOS issue with another Panasonic product.
A friend gave me one of his Flea Market Specials: a Panasonic CF-U1 toughbook. It has the regular accessories like the stylus and batteries and panels but no hard drive and the BIOS lock active ("but what if someone changes my ram??"). I've been throwing every password I could think of at it for two weeks now and it's still locked. There's no technical documentation available so I do not know the CMOS reset procedure and it appears to be NVRAM based so pulling the battery doesn't clear it. In the honorable opinions of Badcaps do you think it's worth continuing to try and salvage or just giving it back to him to sell for parts?

[bossapplesauce]

Re: BIOS Lock. Not sure if it's worth the salvage

Unit has a dedicated security chip. Unless you want to figure out which NVRAM it's using, build a chip reader and then interpret the encrypted machine code, I'd say it's not worth the hassle. Sorry bud.

In case you don't have it, here's some documentation on the unit:

http://www.spiritdatacapture.co.uk/manuals/panasonic/CF-U1%20Reference%20Manual.pdf

[stj]

Re: BIOS Lock. Not sure if it's worth the salvage

if the TPM chip is removeable then bin it.

btw, most of them have a reset method such as a pair of pads to link on the board.

[pentium]

Re: BIOS Lock. Not sure if it's worth the salvage

Forget it. I'll find a better computer.

[Time2Retire]

Re: BIOS Lock. Not sure if it's worth the salvage

Did you try this?

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/CmosPwd

[ThePCDoctor]

Re: BIOS Lock. Not sure if it's worth the salvage

Just curious.....

Is there a separate CMOS battery in that little PC?

If there is, removing all power from the unit, including the big battery pack ,and then removing the little CMOS battery for at least half an hour, will usually drain the CMOS memory chip of all its little electrons.....thus erasing the user set memory (passwords, etc.)

Admittedly, I've not had to do that on a laptop, but it works a treat on Desktop PC's.

I've had PC's that seemed to be completely DEAD, but after clearing the CMOS with the above procedure, they booted up and ran like new.

I'd love to have a crack at that Panasonic. That's one heck of a tough little PC!
I always wanted one, but could never afford it.

Good Luck,
The Doctor

[SteveNielsen]

Re: BIOS Lock. Not sure if it's worth the salvage

That's not going to work in this guy's case. It stores the pword in nvram, not in cmos.