Maximum PC

I have an older HP Compaq 6820s Laptop that I can't get into now. It's kind of a long story on how this happened, but here is the rundown; Me and my girlfriend had a breakup the other night and when I went to pick-up a few things from her house, Laptop included, I tried to get on it this morning and it's asking for a power-on password before windows will load. I have talked to her and she promises that she didn't touch it...

Either way, I looked up a method for doing the "pull battery out and hold power button for 5 secs., replace battery and plug in then turn it on" but it didn't do anything...I tried it a few times as well. HP can't help either since I'm not the original owner, I brought it off craigslist 2 years back.

This is my only computer atm and I really need to get into it, any other ways I can go about this?

Thanks in advance!
~Mike

The battery that needs to be removed is the CMOS battery which is located on the motherboard of the laptop. You'll need to disassemble the laptop by removing the bottom case plate which should give you access to most of the motherboard. From there you'll hopefully be able to see the CMOS battery which looks like a large watch battery.

I wasn't able to find a detailed description of your specific model on what screws to remove to access the mobo but I did find a video of someone assembling one here. You'll kind of have to watch it in reverse to see what screws he removes to get to the mobo but it shouldn't be to difficult. Just remember where you got the screws from for reassembly later.



When you find it take note of weather the positive or negative side is facing you, carefully remove it from the board, hold the power power button for a few seconds, and then replace the battery the way it was before. Screw the back plate on with at least one screw and try to power up the machine.

That should reset the BIOS to the factory default and remove the boot up password. That should solve the issue.

Just a thought, but have you tried to just not enter a password and then press enter?

There is a cmos battery that would clear it, but it may not be real accessible. I ran across this...

http://www.fixya.com/support/t11374124- ... ompaq_6820

Doesn't seem real out of hand...

Well, I just got down putting it back together after pulling the CMOS battery and following the steps described...it didn't do anything, it's still asking for power-on password..any other tips? I really don't want to spend money taking it to a shop, especially if I can do it at home.


*EDIT: I just tried using Hiren's Boot CD to bypass the power-on password, but after I change boot order to optical drive it still asks for the dang password...sigh.

The laptop sounds like it has a hard drive password lock on it and there's nothing you can do with it. If you can not get a password you are totally screwed. The software is physically on the hard drives platter, even if you replaced the circuit board on the drive, it still will be locked.
Your only option is to get a new hard drive and lock it with your own password so nobody else does. you can get a recovery disk from the manufacture, usually for $20. and reinstall your operating system
(or you can make up with your gf and see if she will give you the password)

If the pasword request is coming from the BIOS, i.e., before the hard drive is accessed, then it can be cleared by clearing the cmos. If the password is requested by the o/s, then you better see if the bios has an option of running a recovery program from a hidden partition on the HD. Most machines thatyou buy with the o/s already loaded have a hidden 'recovery' partition that will completely wipe out everything and reload a clean version of the o/s. If so, better have your license key handy...

Sounds like you already have access your bios