The ring is steel, it has tabs that stick up. I honestly used a screwdriver wedged at the corner of the tabs and a hammer, and tapped at each tab a couple times till it came off. Mine was very rusty, too though so a couple of the tabs snapped off.
I did almost the same thing this summer. We were both backing out though, but I was the first to stop. I was in NC at the time though, and it's a no-fault state, so the insurance company, though they said it was only 20% my fault, said they weren't paying for shiznit.
Well...I got lucky. The owner insisted on two different passwords that she might've put in, neither of them worked by themselves and together they made 9 characters but the limit for it is eight. With a little playing around I finally got into it and now I'm finishing up the install of a fresh copy of XP.
To Better explain this I started it up one time and took note of everything it does.
1.) Gateway Splash screen comes up, offers press F2 to enter BIOS. Can get in there no probem. Shows no Supervisor password, but asks for old password if I try to change HD0 password.
2.) If I let the computer boot as normal, but with a bootable CD in... it STILL asks me for the HD0 password, when I enter the wrong one 4 times it locks the HDD and proceeds to the CD menu.
So basically, the BIOS is locking me out of the HDD before I can start any OS or program that might be able to access it. I've even tried changing jumpers on the HDD to make it slave or something and it still stops me to ask for a PW.
I've seen no signs of Windows, I can't get that far. It did have a main BIOS PW on it before and I managed to get that one off (based on things the owner has told me) and the prompt for it is the same as the HD0 one. I can use a boot disk to boot it but it almost seems like the BIOS is basically stopping me from accessing the HDD.
The second PW comes up right after I would've entered the 'Supervisor/Admin' password. It's called the HD0 password, so I'm assuming it's like a password placed on just the master HDD through BIOS. When I pull the HDD out and start it up, it doesn't prompt for the password, just says OS not found.
Ok, I'm attempthing to fix this laptop for my wife's aunt and the story is that she somehow put TWO passwords on the thing and doesn't remember what the other one is. I got the Supervisor password unlocked but I can't seem to get the one that's locking me out of the hard drive (HD0). I left the computer sit overnight with the CMOS battery out and it still hasn't cleared the password. I also looked all around the motherboard and pretty much took it completely apart trying to find a three-pin jumper setup to clear out the CMOS memory. Any ideas on how I can reset this password?
PS - It's a model 9550 with a 1GHz P3, 256 MB RAM, etc.
Wow... C4 and 3.73's. What's that 3500 rpms at 60? My car irritates me with 4.10's and an AOD, can't imagine no OD, but if you don't cruise at long distances then I guess it's not bad.
