zero77

My Borther's old AST Ascentia VL Series laptop has gone a little mad.

It's not accepting his boot up (on BIOS) password. He hasn't changed it.

This morning it was working fine, he changed the power lead and when he re-started the laptop it just wouldn't accept his password. Caps lock isn't on.

Any ideas?

Hobo_Jojo

do u have the motherboard manual? it will help you locate the bios and its jumpers. you need to reset the bios with one. if that fails change the bios battery

zero77

Cheers,

I don't think he has the manual anymore, this laptop is around 6 years old, so it may be the bios battery..

chiark

zero, you may find that the bios password is held in a different area of the BIOS that doesn't get reset. Most laptops are like this for security reasons.

Again for security reasons, they're normally quite hard to bypass and may involve replacing a chip somwhere on the mobo.

Try the reset, the bios may have scrambled and that may just do the job. I don't think ascentia has a bios password clear function like some tosh's do, but it may be worth having a good google for a dongle that'll do the job.

Good luck!
Nick.