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

[InterLinked via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

I might have missed something here, but did you ever try the "backdoor" 
password?

It's been a while since I did this, but I removed many BIOS passwords 
over the years through the approach discussed here: 
https://dogber1.blogspot.com/2009/05/table-of-reverse-engineered-bios.html

Maybe something has changed and that doesn't work anymore, or never 
worked for all laptops to begin with?

The only potential downside is it removes the BIOS password entirely, so 
if you want to get into a computer with a password-protected BIOS 
without changing anything, that approach may not be the best option.

On 1/17/2026 2:44 PM, Casey Bralla via plug wrote:
> 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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