My little brother was killed in a car accident in December. He owned a IBM thinkpad and put a password on the hard drive. We would like to access whatever he had on the computer for memories sake. Is this a lost cause? I have been unable to find a feasible solution. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm assuming that by "HD password" you mean a CMOS password. If this is the case, there are a few things you can do: 1) Take out the hard drive and put it into another computer. It will work fine as long as you've set the jumpers correctly (IBM can help you with this over the phone). 2) Try setting jumpers on the motherboard to clear the CMOS password. Again, IBM will help you if you don't know what to do. 3) There are some DOS programs that can erase CMOS passwords, though only on certain computers. I'm not sure if it will work on a Thinkpad. I have never heard of such a thing as a "Hard Drive Password", however, if there is such a thing, I am sure it is removable and by calling IBM and explaining the situation I don't doubt you could get the hard drive to work again.

also taking out the battery (not the laptop battery) the one on the motherboard (if laptops have them I don't know much about laptops)take it out for about 2-3 min, this will erease the bios back to factory default.

As far as i know the Tkinkpad HD password you set in the BIOS is stored on the HD. It's different from the BIOS password. Somebody told me that it will not work, if you put the HD into another Computer. If IBM can't tell you how to bypass the password, some data recovery firms may be able to help you. But they usually charge a lot. I'm not even sure if it would work to take the magnetic disks out of the HD and put them in a different HD ... Good luck!

To add to what has already been written: I have not worked on an IBM laptop, but I imagine that the procedure is similar: Generally there are jumpers (a little piece of plastic that connects two metal points - just a kind of switch, really) inside the computer that allow you to wipe the CMOS memory (used for storing, among other things, boot-up passwords). Usually, you take out the battery, change the jumper, turn on the computer, turn it back off, replace the jumper, and then all passwords are reset. It's really easy on a big desktop machine, but it is anything but (usually) on a packed-together laptop. My advice is to find a friend that is known for taking things apart and putting them back together again. He doesn't need to know too much about computers, but he should be proficient with small screws. :) The other possibility is that the password exists in software. If you can get the computer to boot up, like to Windows or something, but he has passwords on his files (like Word documents), you will need a friend that DOES know quite a bit about computers. There is a plethora of information on the internet about how to remove passwords for such files, but if you aren't experienced it may be too much. It's worth a shot though. I'm sorry to hear about your brother. At least he is happy now.

Just to clear up some things, first of all thinkpads do have HD passwords. It is stored in encrypted form in track 0 of the drive and there really is no good way to get it out and still save the data on the drive. Second of all thinkpads have NO cmos jumpers! They are NV RAM cmos chips and do not require a battery back-up to maintain memory. There are two kinds of cmos passwords on a thinkpad. 1.User password- remove floppy or cdrom drive and look carefully for a jumper underneath the second battery terminals. With the power off jump across them with a screwdriver and leave it in place while booting the computer. 2.Admin password-bad news-the only thing you can do with this one is short the cmos chip itself. You can tell the difference by if it gives the code 158 before asking for the password. If you need to know how to do this one e-mail me and i will give you further info. Sounds like you probably have a harddrive password to which i really dont know the answer without destroying the data.

UPDATE: Because of working with these every day i may have figured out a way around HD passwords. I've tried it twice and both times it has worked great , but ive only tried it with the 600E series. Currently working on breaking the 760 series. I do remove passwords from IBM Thinkpad 760 series and 600E series laptops and HD passwords on the 600E's. I do charge because on average it takes two to three hours to do one and is very time consuming. Here are some other services so you can compare prices. http://www.pwcrack.com/BIOS/bios.html http://www.onlink.net/nortek/hdd_pw.html Anyway i charge about 50 dollars plus shipping. And unlike the big companies, if you have one of the ones thats easy to remove i'll tell ya.