EggXpert

my friends vista laptop (not sure what brand dell or hp) was making sounds so he shut it off and when he turned it back on it booted up but asked for a system password, this wasnt there before. He didnt know what the password is so he cant get past the boot up menu to download anything to change it. next time i go over im going to try and get into the bios and reset it but if i cant i dont know how to get rid of the password since im not familiar with the inside of laptops...so is this a virus that i should figure out how to wipe the hard drive or what?

Some trojans can wipe the winlogon, though you'll usually see this after a trojan has been removed.

Try the BIOS route, if not see if you can get directly into the recovery partition, provided it has one, or go to the disks.

Whenever I get a corrupt Laptop job, to try and save files, I'll pop the 2.5 HD out and USB it into my "isolated" junker Emachine, tackle the trojan if possible, but media the personal files, and scan after. Usually they're clean. If you need to save the guys files.

Penewah!

thanks, im not to familar with laptops since i have a desktop and i do know i could remove hte bios battery on a PC if its not welded to the motherboard is there a smiliar thing with laptops?

Depends on the model. What is it? Some can be access, other not. I do know with laptops, some makers also provide a default PW, like "Dell" is "Dell." e.g.

What brand and model?, we can try and figure it out.

Penewah!

he said hes got a toshiba

and once again thank you for your help 

no prob, From what I was able to find through research, in the Satellite series, which is like most of their laptops, they have doesn't allow acccess to a CMOS jumper, so you have to pull the battery. It looks like it should be in the front of the notebook. If that doesnt worrk, thre is some sort of loopback approach that seems to work. Let us know if you can't access the battery.

Remember though, latops are a PITA man to work on.

PEnewah! 

alright ill tell um to pull the battery out for 5 minutes and see where that gets him

nope battery didnt work : (

LOL, sorry ACD, I didn't mean the laptop's removable battery for power, I meant inside the laptop itself, on some models you can access the CMOS battery. Tread softly inside a laptop, things are much smaller, and it's tedious stuff, but doable. You'll have to either poke around carefully, or look for a manual, and find it that way, or a solution for that matter, b/c still don't know what model it is.

I have read though that some toshibas cannot be reset through pulling the CMOS battery though. You have to send it in to an authorized repairer who has to do some sort of re-calibration.

There is a backdoor PW though for Toshiba, it's "Toshiba," http://www.tech-faq.com/reset-bios-password.shtml  <---- from this same link, there is also a utility called: CmosPwd that can be used on Toshibas to reset it (scroll down about half ways.)

Anyways, some options to consider, just please, tread aoftly and read up on anything before doing. Always better to be safe than sorry.

Penewah!

 

i read through it fast cause i was in a rush i asked him to look into the bios himself said that it was also passworded he typed in toshiba didnt work so im going to try and open it up next time i go there and pull out the bios battery or the cmos w/e its called i looked up pictures and i feel pretty confident but im not sure how reliable they are from google images

i went there tryed opening it couldnt get the case off cause one of the screws was retarded i did find out the model number is and that i also couldnt even get into the bios there pretty much was absolutly nothing i could get to because the password came up everything i tried. The only thing that i really found out was that its a  A135-S2386 satallite i looked at ur eariler post and u said the battery should be in the front of the laptop can u show me where u read that i should be able to work from there, thanks