Gateway Parts

How do you bypass a HHD password on a Gateway laptop?

My husband's friend gave us an old Gateway laptop for my husband to use when he went to Iraq. Now that he's back, he can't remember what he changed the password to when he was overseas. We don't have any service agreement with Gateway to call them for help since a friend gave it to us. Please help!

Public Comments

1. Try to get into the bios of the laptop like this... As soon as you hit the power button, start hitting F2. if that does nothing, turn the power off, then try it agian with esc key(it might also be del key, same routine) , then select "Enter setup" scroll over to the security tab (with arrows) then "setup pass word" it will either give you option to clear, or setup new one. after you have done that, scroll over to the exit tan, and select "save and exit" this should do it. there is another option if you feeling brave. Take the laptop apart, and remove the little cmos battery for a few minutes. It looks like a watch battery. ther might also be a jumper over there close to it or the cmos chip. i cant remember which key it is exactly, but the del key is what most computers use for entering bios. If I knew the model number i could better help. hope this did it for ya
2. I think you confusing the Hard drive with the bios, so I will walk you through that. Download and burn a DOS boot disk from here: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm Pick anyone of the DOS versions, download and burn them using window's built in utilitys,(format and run the exe to extract) then take another floppy insert the floppy,download the zip file from this website: http://www.majorgeeks.com/KillCMOS_d2969.html format the floppy and extract the files to the floppy. After that insert the DOS boot disk,turn on the computer,let DOS start,then take out the floppy,insert the second one then type,Killcmos. The computer will reboot and the passwords gone. Note:If your Laptop does not carry a floppy drive,you can use a external usb floppy drive too. Hope that helped,if you need me to explain that simpler I can do that too.