Password remove on Tecra 8000

there is a toshiba password dongle that you can get off ebay, this will do the trick.

or alternatively, you need to make a "keydisk" and boot off the floppy drive (it will do a floppy seek first) before the password comes up. i have not tried this. let me know how it works out

Make yourself the "dongle" that resets the password. The "dongle" is a device connected to the parallel (printer) port that has certain combinations of pins wired together. The method used is to attach the dongle, then power the laptop on. When you do this, the password is bypassed, allowing you to get into the BIOS and change or clear the password. Here is the pinout information. Connect these pins on a DB25 plug to make the adapter:

-Keith

In message , Albert Wong writes

The Toshiba Password Dongle is also described on the page you provided the link to below!

"news.rcn.com" bravely wrote to "All" (21 Apr 05 10:27:04) --- on the heady topic of "Password remove on Tecra 8000"

ne> From: "news.rcn.com" ne> Xref: aeinews comp.sys.laptops:3178 sci.electronics.repair:46168 ne> uk.comp.sys.laptops:9674

ne> I am having a problem lots of people are having with a Tecra 8000 ne> which somebody just gave me

ne> It has a password they omitted to mention which locks it completely. ne> How do I get into the BIOS to disable password start or how do I take ne> out the BIOS save battery to disable this feature?

Sometimes booting up with something disabled such as the keyboard or other causes the cmos to go into the setup mode directly bypassing the pw. It will then ask to press F1 then plug in the keyboard and you're then able to clear the pw. You can also provoke a cmos corruption by booting off a custom floppy boot record that zero's out any register. This will typically corrupt the cmos memory, hopefully bypassing the pw or setting it to default. Another way is to power off and monitor the hardware line to the backup battery. Follow the voltage to the LSI pin, then remove the battery and short that pin to ground for a few tens of minutes, then remove the short and replace the battery. Greets!

A*s*i*m*o*v

... Your E-Mail has been returned due to insufficient voltage.

I'll keep on trying but so far I have tried (1) the jumper method which didnt work and (2) the software method. Which program wont execute

(it opens a DOS window in XP and closes it immediately without writing anything to file), which is just as well because the computer gives the impression that it isn't trying to read from the floppy before asking for the password

I have probably shorted some of the wires so I may try that again before going to the EBay method which I am sure is a great method if you have a few hundred of these to do? I am a bit shocked at the Toshiba authorised service station cost of doing something this easy AND the naivety of the WUGNET sysops who thought that a premier service station wouldn't overcharge this much.

Another way is to short one of the address lines to the CMOS RAM to VCC or Ground as the system posts. This may cause defaults to be loaded due to incorrect checksum, and the password will be erased. I did this on a stinkpad some years ago.

Stepan

Clint

In response to your request, the keydisk program doesn't seem to do anything except cause a DOS screen to hang, admittedly with a note telling me that Keydisk has run

Running it may only entail changing some Sector 2 entries on the floppy and I cant figure out how to see whether these have been changed or not but anyway, it doesn't seem to let me change the password. I may try to see if I can enter some hexedit program and see if it did do anything but I did follow the instructions and press ENTER on first demand for a password and Y on the next demand and just received a further demand which I take to indicate that it hasnt run or the unit isnt booting off the floppy or the app doesn't work?