missus laptop fail

Hello gents.

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite Pro L300.

The problem is this, turn it on,,, booting up.. you get the screen where you can press f2 for setup utility and f12 for boot manager, then it goes to a black screen bu with a blue box saying enter current password. Now none of the passwords she uses work. so im stumpet. also on the boot up thing, pressing f2 or f12 does nothing, it just goes to this password box. enter it wrong 3 times the lappy turns off.? Anybody have any auggestions? I was thinking to boot from cd and use the windows xp to re install but i cant change it to boot from cd lol

is it a basic boot pw or a hdd unlock password?

ITs not like a windows user log in password box, its just one black screen with a blue box asking for a current password. IS it a windows recovery password? bios maybe?

ok she just informed me that it was doign the 3 step revovery thing and kept aborting and failing and now this password thing appeard.

Am i right in thinking when loading up you can hold some keys tomake boot from cd and not have to go into the bios?

nope, bios password it sounds like, and that comes first. You can search google for disabling the bios password in that model, it may work, but you also may have to take it to a toshiba repair shop to have them do this. Also it could be a disk encryption password, if it is, you need the pw or the data is gone, but I am thinking that from the brief description that it is the bios because if you hit f2 it asks for the password.

http://www.google.cz/search?q=disabl...ient=firefox-a

How to guide:
http://jevarax.wordpress.com/2008/08...bios-password/

Picture of the hw way to do this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/2264118...n/photostream/

Try holding down "ESC" during boot - I've heard that prompts a boot device screen

If all else fails you may be able to reset the bios to factory defaults by removing the cmos battery or finding the relevant jumper on the mainboard, although I've never tried this with a lappy so might be a pain in the ass.

If you have a floppy drive (shock horror), and that boots - you can also use Keydisk. Search for "Toshiba keydisk".

There are also some crazy things you can do with the parallel port - Google for "Toshiba Parallel loopback"

It's also worth checking for "backdoor passwords". Some manufacturers have bios passwords that always work... You can find these on the Internets, however YMMV.