telamascope
2007-09-08 16:33:43 UTC
I recently bought a used t42 laptop. the porblem arose when i found out that the windows XP on the machine was not legit.
while trying to install a new version using IBM rescue and recovery, i noticed that there was a BIOS supervisor password set that prevented me from changing the settings. the machine also had a start-up password, but this was blank.
using instructions from IBMs support site, i removed the battery on the motherboard, hoping it would erase the password. after a couple of minutes i put everything back in place and tuned it on only to have a few error messages show up, mentioning that a) the system time had been reset and b) the system had been tampered with.
when i tried to acess BIOS again, i found the start-up password to have changed and as a result, the computer will not boot further than that.
can anyone help me???