[Thinkpad] T40: no place to enter bios supervisor password

[paul]

Jon Etkins wrote on 8/7/2007 12:16 AM:
> paul wrote:
>> ...
>> The thing is that I have set the supervisor password as the power-on 
>> password only with one letter uppercase, like "hello" (power-on) and 
>> "hEllo" (supervisor). Is it possible that the passwords are not 
>> case-sensitive and using the same password for power-on and 
>> supervisor creates the issue I have?
>
> Could be.  
I tried entering the power-on password with different cases and it 
proved to be *not case-sensitive*. But see below.
> Try hitting F1 at the splash screen, instead of the blue button.  That 
> will tell it you want to go directly to the BIOS, instead of the 
> pre-desktop area.  If there's a conflict, it may be taking the 
> less-authorized route since you're not immediately going into a 
> "restricted" operation; going directly to the BIOS may make it match 
> the Supervisor password over the User.
tried that, it didnt help. See below.
>
> If that doesn't work, you could try removing the AC cord, battery, and 
> BIOS backup battery, and holding down the power button for 30 seconds 
> or so.  That should clear the BIOS and any power-on password, leaving 
> only the Supervisor password in effect.
And yes, I jumped into this as well -- guided by the thinkpad hardware 
maintenance manual. Having cleared the BIOS settings and power-on 
password, starting up the computer gave those errors (date/time and 
"reset to default BIOS settings" or so) and took me right to a password 
prompt (before entering BIOS) that looks the same as for the power-on 
password. And then the surprise: my (power-on/supervisor) password didnt 
work with this prompt. I must admit I started sweating at that point. 
The laptop seemed blocked, even that I knew 100% what the supervisor 
password is.
After heavy guessing and lots of googling / reading I found some hint of 
a 7 character limit on the supervisor password. This hint wasnt exactly 
in my context and even not for T40 but I just tried entering the 
supervisor password upto 7 characters (it is longer). And it worked and 
let me into BIOS. There I checked the setting for "password length" and 
it was disabled, so the limitation to 7 characters is some 
non-documented peculiarity. I am also sure that before I never enabled 
the password length setting in the BIOS. (note that for a previous bios 
update the full length supervisor password worked fine)

I didnt debug this further, as it seemed too dangerous to me playing 
with this supervisor password. But it could be that from the very 
beginning, when having entered the same password for power-on and 
supervisor, entering only 7 characters for the supervisor password on 
power-on would have given me supervisor access to the BIOS.

Thanks a lot for your help. It put me on the right track.

Paul