Ooo! I can probably make one of those.

Ah the legend himself! And I would argue you get more info in most of your videos than I have on my entire channel. Without a doubt your videos were the inspiration to buy a hot air station and give it a go, lol.

Hi! I started watching your video. Something i love to watch because I was a computer technician and dealing with almost everything you've shown there.

> "you never know what else is getting powered up by the clamp" In fact, most of all times it's the KBC. Which will then try to read its firmware from the same chip, and then attempt to start the motherboard or at least its always-on devices like a charging port. And hopefully everyone here knows that on SPI bus there is no mandated hardware detection of colliisions, and flash chips are "dumb" either way, so reading the chip in the same time the KBC accesses it is bad.

The ch431 doesnt have a problem with the 5 volt "issue". It is well explained and tested in this video: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gJ5dhstoqdDNiKs.htmlsi=Mei2TuFyq16XZaZ3

I think that cant'b be done in newer models but at least worked in your Lenovo, thanks for the reminder !

@@wendellparham5545 interesting...

I spent many years as a service tech, & I used this trick on a lot of machines to get around weird BIOS locks.

How u dell laptop

Works great on T48s but not on T51s. The Password is stored inside the CPU. So even replacing the Flash does not help. This is part oft this Intel Anti Theft.

same in old Dells

Nec too

Nice quest tho

real life side quest

An erased chip is all FF's. If the BIOS is in Intel Hex format, rather than binary, it would only contain the pages of bytes that have zero's in them; thus it could contain the entire BIO's while still being a very small file.

The memory chip sizes are in the powers of two and the binary found was 9,1MB. Therefore it would not fit on a 8MB chip but does fit on a 16MB chip.

Hex IS binary, not rather than. It's just binary converted into a more people friendly way to read. All hex values are stored in, you guessed it, binary. If all bytes were FF then all bits are 1. Intel Hex just encodes/decodes in this instance is just compression. Everything is stored in binary, there is no "rather than binary"

@@shhhvcnear You know only half of what you think you know. "Hex IS binary, not rather than." Hex is ASCII TEXT, Binary is BINARY. "It's just binary converted into a more people friendly way to read." Converted, yes; which means it is NO LONGER BINARY. Hex REPRESENTS binary and it is more than "a more people friendly way to read". A server may not be able to accept binary and so the data may be CONVERTED to ASCII. ASCII Hex cannot have a '1' in the eight bit; if it did, it would be binary data and NOT hex. "If all bytes were FF then all bits are 1." Obviously. "Everything is stored in binary, there is no rather than binary" That's a half truth, which you don't understand because your knowledge of binary is very simplistic. Yes, everything is bits and is binary, but when engineers (and most computer literate people) refer to a binary file, they're referring to a file that has unformatted data or to be more specific, a non-text file. If you format a file to ASCII hex, then it is no longer considered a binary file (even though the data within is still made up of binary data). ASCII hex breaks the binary bytes into 4 bit nibbles, so each byte of the data is represented by two ASCII text bytes in hexadecimal format, neither of which have a '1' as the most significant bit. "Intel Hex just encodes/decodes in this instance is just compression." When you load an Intel hex file into a programmer, all data is first erased from the chip, which means all bits are '1' or FF. Each line in the Intel hex file (which is ASCII text, not binary) contains an address of where in memory to write the data, the data itself and a length of bytes to write, including a checksum. The hex fields (which are ASCII hex, not BINARY) are then converted to their binary values and used to modify the buffer that was previously filled with FF's before being programmed. It's not really just compression because it doesn't contain all the data within it. Instead, it assumes that any data that's not included within it is FF. So if you didn't fill the buffer with FF's first, then the data will be incorrect. usually the programmer will automatically fill the buffer with FF's before loading the Intel hex file. A compressed file contains all data and doesn't rely on assumptions. Intel hex format can also be used to patch an existing program (but this is likely over your head so I won't discuss it further). In summary, Intel hex format doesn't need to write pages of FF's in any area because there already are FF's there from erasing. Since there are a lot of FF's in firmware, the intel hex file can be much smaller than the actual binary, even though there are two ASCII bytes representing each byte of the actual binary.

Agree. All chips, AFAIK, stores info in binaries. Even disc storages.

Swapping the amount of RAM also sometimes works.

useful tip! I've had issues with pre-crippled SFF's where they won't run with anything other than the supplied chip, every time I managed to fix it. Possibly why a lot of the "faulty/spares or repair" ones have a different CPU, someone has taken out the good working chip and substituted a potato or worse, a faulty processor.

@@conundrum2007I was gonna do that to a OptiPlex, guess I can’t?

@@dothatjustin Try it. Other option might be to send me the bad BIOS IC and I will attempt to clone it to a new one. Sometimes that is all you need, done this once before.

@@conundrum2007huh, well I’m always willing to learn more, I’m not sure what to do tho and if you wanted to try it out I can try sending it maybe ilyk

🗿

Two more likes and we'll get this comment to 37, too.

Whoops lol

​@@HardwareHaven37

Bios means life

Interesting.

Doesn’t this only work on vPro systems?

Need more details

"There is another way of removing BIOS-password by using Intel ME software. Basically, it allows you to read and write BIOS chip from Windows, without soldering the chip." If you could do that, then it means you don't need to do it because you're already past the BIOS password.

@@lizardking8388 Still good for a BIOS only password to get into the settings, not a power on password.

lmfao

UEFI attacks do this exact thing to gain control of the host before the OS level user can interfere.

Needs to be made illegal big time

Enabling BitLocker is one of mine. Mwahahahaha!

​@@conundrum2007 *reinstalls windows*

I did this too with a Toshiba Laptop! I think it was a Satellite

@@ypesh Yes, I have just been down to my workshop and it's a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300 Series. I must do something with it, actually - I should install Windows 2000 on it and fire up a few old retro games, it seems to work perfectly otherwise.

I don't recall which Toshiba I got, but the BIOS password could essentially be cleared by corrupting a checksum used by CMOS to validate itself. If the validation failed CMOS would be reset clearing the password in the process. The wild part is that this could be done from within (32 bit) Windows using the old 16bit debug hex editor that it used to ship with.

@@Electracion oh wow from within Windows? That's so cool, I had no idea 😂 I only did the parallel port dongle reset and then. I think I eventually sold it. It was such a well built solid laptop. I think I had either XP or Windows 2000 on it.

@@ypesh My 4300 series has got a WIndows XP key on its sticker but I am sure when I checked a while ago that there were Windows 2000 versions too - so I think you're correct on that.

What was it?

I wish I was on this level of technical skill

having a listing that says locked bios on a dual bios mobo with a hardware switch would be funny haha

Thanks! I was nervous to try something different haha

I was thinking the same thing since he had a backup of the locked version. Would come in handy if considering buying more.

that is true. But it does matter on chromebooks. If you lose the original firmware it's a paperweight if you didn't already put good working custom firmware on it

I would not call it blown! Its just stupid saying i blown a mother board without any components blown up i would call it bricked! Please say it right

I think this has to be the dumbest mistake to make the bios upgradable and not have a failsafe in case something goes wrong, but once again this might be just another reason to sell you more hardware. I never upgrade the bios, especially on expensive laptops, because if something goes wrong, good luck, all you have left is a expensive piece of junk.

@@309electronics5 say it how you wish. trust me, When i flashed the wrong BIOS from being in a hurry and I needed to use the computer, it was truly "blown up" at the time (this was 20 odd years ago) I had no hope of ever fixing it at that time nor did i know if i could ever fix it. It was just by accident that I got given a similar MB with the same BIOS chip a few years later. Yes, it bricked or blown or non functional and it was just lucky that i fixed it.

​@@D4no00most pcs nowadays have 2 copies of bios

@@JordanPlayz158 "most" is the perfect word to describe this. Since there is no standard, you are not guaranteed that you won't brick the device should something go wrong.

If it just encrypts the BIOS, then it may not be stored at all.

True, but that should also be easy to spot - if you add an 8 character password and the entire file changes then it encrypted the whole thing. Or I should say most. Because a small piece would have to stay unencrypted to ask for the password and decrypt the rest.@@anon_y_mousse

Or just generate a hash from string of text and replace the existing hash with the new one.

​@@StuffJason437 If you got a bunch of equipment from the same location, knowing the password can be more helpful. For example, the state government education department I used to work for used the same BIOS password for over a decade in all schools across hundreds of different models of computer. The password was "danish", for anyone who wants to work out what state it was (it was well known). So if anyone was buying equipment from a school, and got 5 or 6 different models, flashing one fixed bios wouldn't help but cracking the password probably would.

Prices rises so fast)

At least it wasn't 'Bob'

Thanks! I'm really trying haha

Name of this software?

@@Unmixable404 RCUnlocker

i wrote software that does that... unfortunately it was for work... so only they can use it... i can't give away the trade secrects ;)

Isn't that thing wireless only? Or you can attach cables to it and use it like the programmer he showed?

@@TerminalHeatSink iirc it has usb and gpio

i own a flipper, didn't know it could be used in that way

Thanks! Will do!

a n i m e n i m e

What were the specs

@@BnE-sports ROG G750JH (Black Flag edition) Has a i7-4700HQ and a GTX 780M among other things.

Glad to hear it!