Precision 7520 issue with sBIOS

So yesterday I came into possession of a Precision 7520 from work.

Issue is they have had it sitting on a shelf for maybe 2 years now due to one issue. The employee that used to use it was previously fired a little before my time, something about losing 100,000 USD of equipment.

I guess what happen is to spite the company he applied Passwords to the BIOS and each drive as well as passwords to his user account, and also disabled booting from USB, cant refresh the system either. Since this was before they actually had a formal IT group here, that information was never centralized and now that this employee is gone the laptop has since become a paperweight.

My question to you all, is it possible to flash via a programmer to overwrite the currently existing BIOS settings?

Would replacing the BIOS chip resolve this issue or is that information stored elsewhere on the system?

My boss is telling me to throw it away but its in great condition and I dont like tossing things that are far from retired service.

@Aaron44126

Thanks in advance fella's

 

My experience has been that resetting the BIOS by unplugging the coin cell battery is enough to remove the BIOS settings password lock and boot password lock. I've done this a few times on my M6700 — not specifically to reset the password, but to solve some other BIOS issue, and the password was lost as a side effect. I haven't heard anything about this being made more "secure" with more recent systems.

The drives might be a little trickier. Depending on the drive, there may or may not be an easy method to simply bypass or remove the drive password (since many drive manufacturers do not implement the security properly)... But I think that there are manufacturer tools to do a "secure erase" procedure on the drive which will clear that out (but also lose all of the data). From there, if you don't need anything on the drive, you should be good to reinstall Windows.

To get into the Windows account (if it's not a domain account), you'll need to be able to boot from separate media but still have access to the drive (i.e. no password or encryption blocking you on that). You can then use a bootable Windows password reset tool, or just use anything with access to the files to replace utilman.exe with a copy of cmd.exe ... and then clicking the "ease of access" button on the login screen will open up a command prompt, and from there you can open MMC (or anything else you like) and reset the password directly.

 

Yeah I tried resetting the NVRAM but no dice, Im going to attempt again later tonight and remove the CMOS battery again and attempt to drain the battery by leaving it alone for a couple of days and see if that will do the trick, maybe I was just not giving it.

As for the drives, worst case scenario I can always just use other drives. Not a big issue. Just an extra detail at this point, as can always replace the drive if needed. I am not as well read in the newer systems so I was curious if there were additional details to consider.

Worst case scenario though, if I got a 7520 BIOS chip preloaded for replacement, would that resolve this or are there other details to consider?

 

It looks like you can get a "BIOS release code" from Dell if they can verify system ownership. If it was purchased by the company that you work for then this shouldn't be too hard.
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000131024/how-to-clear-the-bios-password
(I suppose you might have to pay for a service incident if the system is out of warranty ...)

My previous attempts with pulling the coin-cell battery had the password lost immediately (I only had it unplugged for a few seconds). Though again I have not tried this on anything newer than the M6700.
It seems like replacing the BIOS chip would resolve the issue (maybe you could salvage one from a "broken" motherboard) but I've never heard of this being attempted before.

 

Under typical circumstances that would be correct, but this company only recently went from small to medium and documentation is something they are still figuring out now, where as before it was everyone on their own. I'll hit up my boss if NVRAM reset doesnt work out to see if they may have that info but I doubt it

 

Dell Support should be able to determine who purchased the system based on the service tag. If it's tied to your company then it should just be a matter of confirming that's where you're calling from in order to get them to release the codes. (Maybe they'd need to get in touch with whoever is primary on your account with them.)

Ran across this tool which claims to be able to produce the correct response to the recovery code. (I presume you enter the BIOS and do "forgot password" and it gives you some code that you're supposed to hand to Dell support, but you just hand it to this tool instead.) Maybe there are other such tools available...
https://bios-pw.org/

 

Nothing ventured nothing gained, ill give it a go after I pickup the laptop from my other supervisor who wanted to try and crack it first

 

Used one of those password generator sites and it worked like a charm, I believe its technically the "rescue" password.

Was able to remove all the passwords and reinstall Win10, were in business

 

Cool, was it the one linked above or a different one?
(Just would be handy to know in case this ever comes up again.)

 

It was the very same linked above