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$10 programmer saves BIOS-locked Lenovo ThinkPads from the dump

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$10 programmer saves BIOS-locked Lenovo ThinkPads from the dump

Rebooted by Hileeq has shared how others can get cheap Lenovo ThinkPads and save them from becoming e-waste by using a simple BIOS unlock hack that only requires a $10 programmer and another laptop or PC. The technique is niche, known mostly by technicians, but Hileeq is the first to give this bypass mass attention with an easy-to-follow YouTube tutorial.

Rebooted by Hileeq's channel, dedicated to fixing cheap eBay finds, documents the process and what he learned while fixing the laptops. Three weeks ago, he posted a video explaining how to bypass locked Lenovo ThinkPads with Intel 4th- to 8th-generation CPUs using a cheap CH431A programmer to read, write, erase, and save EEPROM and SPI flash memory.

Companies often add supervisor passwords to the fleet of ThinkPads they hand out to their employees as an IT security measure. When these ThinkPads are disposed of, often with the storage removed and destroyed, it’s rare that the supervisor passwords are included and documented. These locked ThinkPads are then incredibly cheap because of the lack of access, ending up as e-waste most of the time. However, Victor Voinea shared a post in a Romanian forum containing his ThinkPad supervisor removal exploits.

Unfortunately, Voinea’s method generated a random password every time the exploit was run, requiring users to contact Voinea for the key specific to the generated hardware ID — and getting the password wasn’t free. However, in 2020, Knucklegrumble posted a free way to bypass the password in the Badcaps electronics repair forum.



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