Recovering a password-protected ThinkPad T60

I was in my second year of University and really needed a computer for my studies. My last machine had been an Amiga A1200, which I adored, but sadly was going to be too much work to get it into a useful state for studies. I bought my first PC - a Thinkpad T40 brand new. I was intrigued about the 'embedded securiy subsystem'. Back then things like this seemed cool and exciting to me. I set a password, excited that I could lock the system at such low level. It rebooted, I typed in the password, and it beeped at me an error. I typed it in again, and got another beep. I remember starting to sweat. Third time it worked. I must have typo'd something, so I immediately unset it and never did that again.

Older laptops tend to have all sorts of hacks, master passwords and whatnot, because they realized these scenarios happen and with physical access and enough time it&#x27;s generally game over any way.<p>I wish this were possible with current-day phones. I&#x27;ve had multiple instances of a friend or relative either buying or getting handed an older iphone, and if the previous owner did the responsible thing of resetting the phone beforehand, it will refuse to get past initial setup without a stable wifi connection and the previous owner&#x27;s icloud credentials. Tracing down the previous owner and getting them to change their password or disable the &quot;find my&quot; feature for this one time operation is harder than you&#x27;d think, especially if it was passed down multiple hands or the account is from a different person (and the original owner was never aware). In some of these instances we&#x27;ve had no choice but to throw the brick away.

For a number of years I used to buy BIOS locked thinkpads off ebay for pittance, do this and sell them again as working. Made a small fortune. Most of them were from ex corps who just pulled the disks out and the disposal company didn&#x27;t know how to do it.<p>Eventually my wife got fed up of boxes of bits of laptops everywhere.

Fun, years ago I bought a T60 and I locked it by accident only to spend the night trying to fix it. I used the same method described here and I actually remember this page <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ja.axxs.net&#x2F;t60_t60p.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ja.axxs.net&#x2F;t60_t60p.htm</a><p>I had a post on Reddit shit it and people kept finding years later. I would receive a message every once in a while about it, until they stopped completely.

I&#x27;m using a T60 right now. Love the keyboard feel, I enjoy a 4:3 resolution too.<p>Can anyone recommend a newer laptop with a nice keyboard? I find all new laptops keyboards feel like a flat piece of plastic.

I got &quot;lucky&quot; with a T60 I bought for €25 last year - only the HD was password-locked (I think there are up to 3 levels of password security possible on the T60), so I solved the problem by replacing the HD with a (higher-capacity) spare I had lying around.

It&#x27;s cool how shorting pins seems to be a common hack for accessing devices. The way to jailbreak the Nintendo Switch also involves shorting the pins that connect the main device to the detachable controllers.

Those of you from an even earlier era might remember &quot;lkwpeter&quot; and &quot;alfarome&quot;. An era of relative freedom, when security was still only for &quot;keeping honest people honest&quot;...

Nice writeup. It&#x27;s brought back memories of resetting bios boot passwords on even earlier laptops by shorting out two of the parallel port pins with (iirc) the right value of resistor.

&gt; <i>&quot;...These laptops are classics, but they are really starting to show their age. I’ve even encountered issues like the WiFi chip causing lots of trouble, with the connection being very spotty and borderline unusable.&quot;</i><p>Is it really a case and there is a reason for WiFi chip degradation?

A friend of mine have found a fun way to bypass the bios password of thinkpads. With some trial and errors, you short some pins on bios eeprom at the right time so it will read all 0xff’s. It just happen to be that all 0xff’s means the bios password is not set.

Oh man this is great, I have a W701DS that&#x27;s not much newer than this, gonna try!

How would one have figured this out? I assume only because it&#x27;s documented in a service manual? Would this be within the BIOS if one disassembled the code?

What is an robust business grade solution to BIOS passwords? Didn&#x27;t write enterprise grade because we have dozens of PCs, not thousands or tenthousands Open source friendly solutions preferred. We use only Linux, no Windows.