Embassy TPM and System Passwords: OH HELL!!!

For my E6500, I've irrevocably lost my TPM Owner's Password, and I've lost my System password. The good news: I still have the Hard Drive Password, and the Windows admin password. The fingerprint reader is still working, still allowing me to login to the machine on startup. The bad news: if the fingerprint reader stops working, I won't be able to login anymore...

Is there any way I can recover the TPM Owner password and the system password? I can't add any new fingerprints to the machine now, because it wants me to enter the password, which I don't have now!!!

 

You should definitely be able to change the Windows admin password, especially if the account you're able to access with the fingerprint reader is already an admin account. You may not be able to change the password on the current account directly, as it will probably prompt for the current passwords before allowing a change. However, you could create a new admin account, login to that admin account, then force a password reset on your current account from there. Otherwise, especially since you have the hard drive password, you could use a boot disk approach, etc.

I'm not aware of any options for the TPM and the system password short of calling Dell. At the very least, I'm guessing you could send in the system to them or have them send out a tech to reset things.

 

I'm chatting with Dell support now. Let's see how this goes...

(So far, not good... they keep asking me for the error message, I keep telling them there is no error...)

 

Hot dang!

I've got to give Dell's tech support a gold star on this one. After a rather long series of conversations with two different tech support folks (via chat), all has been fixed. The system password, they were able to help me reset. The TPM stuff and fingerprints, etc, all had to be wiped and re-created from scratch. The bad news: I lost everything in my Document Vault. The good news: I'd already backed up everything in my Document Vault, so nothing was actually lost.

All and all, I am really impressed with Dell here--they really stepped up to the plate on this one!

 

What did they do to restore it? Just a simple master key password they have based on your machine?

 

Yes, that's pretty much it.