I've bought a 2nd hand "Dell Latitude" and i can work on it no problem so i thought everything would be O.K. The problem starts now i want to install a new OS on it (XP) i need to be in the bios to meke eighther the CD-rom or the Diskdrive startup able. I now found out there is a Admin Password in my Latitude and the person i bought it from is nowhere to be found. Can anyone help me delete the adminpassword. I already tried to: remove the batery and the backup batery and left it like that for a week. after startup it gave a setup error and i thought it was gone. everything was gone exept the admin password. all i can do now is this: H E L P M E !!! P L E A S E...

Ty contacting Dell. www.dell.com

Contact the person who sold it to you! Try and flash the bios. If you take out the CMOS battery and put it back in again it will wipe the password off! ____________________________________________ http://benscomputing.tripod.com www.geocities.com/benscomputing

There should be a jumper near the cmos battery that can be moved over to reset the cmos. Do a google search and see if you can find technical drawings of your motherboard to locate the correct jumper, sometimes it is printed on the motherboard by the jumper "cmos". If it doesn't have a jumper for reset, sometimes there are two small metal bumps that can be shorted with a screw driver. But research it first. Good Luck.

None of those will work because the Dell's use a Phoenix bios. If the primary/admin password is set you will not be able to boot to a floppy OR cd-rom drive before the password block kicks in. I am working on this very same issue right now. Since you stated you already unplugged the batteries your only option is to call DELL support. From what I've heard they are scrutinous about verification and ownership of the laptop before they give out the master or backdoor password to anyone. Since you aren't the original owner this may cause a problem but its worth a shot. FYI...not to be offensive in this follow-up, but it really annoys me when exclamation points are used to say what you have already tried, as in RESPONSE#2. READ THE ORIGINAL COMMENTS, TITAN !!!!!