Ray Arachelian wrote:
Al Hartman wrote:
I bought a thinkpad 600e for a friend several
years ago on eBay. She put it in storage for a year, and when she pulled it out the backup
battery has died. I replaced it, but now the unit is asking for a password.
You could get an external 2.5" USB<->ATA enclosure, move the drive
to
that and get at the data that way.
It's weird how the manual states 'hdd replacement' for forgotten password,
rather than just saying it needs to be reformatted. I assume that was just an
error in IBM's terminology (and they really don't do something like screwing
around with the drive firmware :)
You're probably onto something, though - I bet they just goof around with the
MBR or something to stop the drive booting (so with a bit of effort a new MBR
could be written via another box, or the filesystem read out 'raw' and
accessed as a loopback device under Linux / *BSD)
(I don't have an suitable 2.5" adapter with me here, or I'd do some tests
with
my 600E - I've not got anything on its drive that I want to keep right now anyway)
cheers
Jules