Almost dead laptop - won't boot into Windows, Safe mode or BIOS

hsehestedt said:

LOL. That's how I got my start. I started my career with a deep background in electronics as an electonics "super geek". I still have my soldering irons, bins full of resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc. I just don't get too much opportunity to that stuff lately :-(

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This looks like a bit of fun and fairly easy . I am almost tempted to buy one just to try it

No tools to purchase for this job:


I have one of these 8300 machines, but it is less straightforward than the 7010 , it really needs a programmer and a heat gun

I didnt need to do any of that for my ivybridge b75 motherboard because there is already a gigabyte bios that does it.

The toshiba laptop I am using has an access panel on the bottom that allows access to hard drive, ram and the coin cr2032 battery.

One other idea is to do what I did with this laptop, when I got it, a friend of my mom's had 6 of their old laptops laying around, wanted the hard drives removed so she could get rid of them, and then gave me the laptops without the drives. I had a hard drive with windows 11 pro on it in a laptop that the gpu died in and lost the display. I took that hard drive out and used it to figure out which of the laptops would possibly work. had to set the bios to something other than uefi since i installed windows 11 with rufus on that drive.... it booted up and has been working fine, took a little bit while screen said getting devices set up, and then to activate windows, it detected a hardware change, simply selected the laptop the drive came from as the one i am using and it activated. The toshiba is now a fully functional working laptop and has a very good battery, so it will be the one I plan on using out of the 6. may get drives for the other 5 and set them up with something and sell them as cheap laptops but right now basically got a replacement laptop for the one that let the smoke out of for a couple hours of work. It might be worth a try for you as well.

Mine has a few panels as well but none helpful. Two for hard drives, one for battery and a possible useful one, for memory. However the memory one only gives access to the memory chips. If I removed the chips maybe there would be access to BIOS reset pins. Unlikely to be access to a battery.

do you have a laptop hard drive with windows 11 on it that fits a laptop laying around? if you do may be able to use that

Unfortunately no. so can't try that. However I am doubtful it would work as, if my understanding is correct, the need for a password is a BIOS issue and at that stage, the code that is running is not Windows. It is either built into the BIOS or in the boot sector of the har disk. I suppose it could work if the password was built into the boot sector.

Sigurd said:

Unfortunately no. so can't try that. However I am doubtful it would work as, if my understanding is correct, the need for a password is a BIOS issue and at that stage, the code that is running is not Windows. It is either built into the BIOS or in the boot sector of the har disk. I suppose it could work if the password was built into the boot sector.

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Password is in CMOS -- not on HDD. Not sure if you can flash the BIOS via some sort of olf "Floppy" disc stand alone program. That laptop might still have a floppy disc slot -- and in those times the boot device was often by default the floppy drive rather than "C" internal HDD.

Cheers
jimbo

Do you mean the 5 1/4" floppies or the 3 1/2" ones? Laptop not that old - neither floppy drive.

does it give you a hash if you tried several times with the wrong passwrd?

No - it gives me 3 attempts and then switches off.

If it doesnt lock and lets you keep trying 3 times then you can try the obvious Toshiba. That used to work for some of the old ones. Sometimes entering 4 spaces will work.


Otherwise, It could be these two circled in red if you can find them