I used to work in a educational facility where there are hundreds of HP computers to manage. One of the biggest headache I face there was preventing the computer hardware such as RAM from being stolen. The computer case has a small hole where I can use a small padlock to prevent the case from being opened by unauthorized person but for some reason the management didn’t want to buy the locks. Fortunately there is a built-in function where I can lock the casing from the BIOS and logically I have to set a password on the BIOS to prevent the users from accessing the BIOS to unlock the case.

One problem solved but another problem surfaced which is the HP machine only allow the user up to 3 chances to enter the correct BIOS password before the BIOS itself is locked out, preventing the password which I’ve set earlier. The only way that I can get the BIOS unlocked is to call HP to schedule an on-site service and that cost money. If you searched in ebay, there are people selling service in bios password removal for a fee and I thought that surely there are keygenerators for that. I searched harder and found Dogbert’s article on BIOS password backdoors in laptops.


When a computer or laptop is locked out, you will be presented with a scary “System Disabled“, “Password check failed. Fatal Error. System Halted” message with numbers. Take note of the number because that piece of information is very important to generate the BIOS backdoor password.

All you need to do is to note down the numbers and then go to this page to download the correct key generator based on the brand of your computer or laptop. Enter the numbers on the program, hit enter and the master password will be displayed. Then boot up the computer that is locked out and just type in the password which will instantly unlock the computer.

Obviously you have to run the keygenerator on a computer that you can boot in to Windows. If you don’t know which pwgen to use, it is also safe to try all of them until you find the one that matches your laptop. Recently Dogber has even included a python script to generate master password for Sony laptops. You can get that by going to the main page of Dogber’s blog. This guy is a genius!