Re: [PLUG] Woo Hoo! I Made Hackaday!

[Casey Bralla via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

Why did I do, knowing it was unlikely to be successful?

1. Hubris.  Maybe I could pick the seed parts of the password in my guess file and let the script try possible permutations on those seeds.  I tried 1 million combinations this way.
2. It was a technical challenge to setup the program and generate the guess words.  I did it for the "existential pleasure of engineering", not because I needed the laptop.  Actually, the current BIOS settings make it quite usable as a Linux machine, so there was no real practical need other than my own enjoyment.
3. I didn't need the crappy old laptop, so no problem letting it sit and chug away for 6 months.  Heck, I may still try something else and let it run for another year.  So why not?

And yes, the system crashed and had to be rebooted a few times.  The script accepted a command line parameter to jump ahead in the guess list so I didn't have to repeat tests.

Casey

On 1/17/26 1:45 PM, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:

> Ah, I guess I didn't zoom in and look closely enough at the screen to
> see the Windows logo in the corner. I assumed you must have been using
> Linux since you mentioned installing Debian on it, and I couldn't see
> how you could do that AND have your cracker running for 6 months.
>
> I guess you must have let it run for all that time first, then gave up
> and installed Linux? Figuring out how to run the app from PowerShell
> is clever, but aside from that I'm not really seeing the point of this
> exercise. Once you realized the size of your search space and how slow
> it was to call the app, why did you leave it running for 6 months?
> Were you at least check-pointing where you were in case of a power
> failure or BSOD?
>
> Walt
>
> On Sat, Jan 17, 2026 at 06:20:48AM -0500, Casey Bralla via plug wrote:
> > It was a hack that failed :(
> >
> > There's a windows app (not Linux) that let's you manipulate the BIOS.  One
> > of those manipulation commands is to change/set/unset the password.  The app
> > normally runs as a GUI, but can be called from PowerShell with admin
> > privileges.  There doesn't seem like there's any limit to the number of
> > times it could be run, but at 9 seconds per cycle, who cares.
> >
> > I swapped the hard drive in the laptop and installed a clean Windows 10,
> > then ran a python script in PowerShell to call the HP routine.
> >
> > On 1/16/26 10:42 AM, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:
> > > That's cool, but is it really a "hack" if you haven't actually cracked
> > > it yet? :)
> > >
> > > I'm a bit confused about what you're doing. It sounds like HP has a
> > > program that you can run in user-space on Linux that access the bios
> > > settings of the machine it's running on. Is that the case?
> > >
> > > I'm a bit surprised that it lets you guess passwords forever, but I
> > > suppose if I knew it would take 180 trillion years to brute force I
> > > might not bother writing any code to lock out the party that's trying
> > > to crack the code, either.
> > >
> > > Walt
> > >
> > > On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 09:14:21PM -0500, Casey Bralla via plug wrote:
> > > > https://hackaday.com/2026/01/15/project-fail-cracking-a-laptop-bios-password-using-ai/
> > > >
> > > > Casey
> > > >
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