Laptop bios serial flash in circuit programming

[Stonent]

I'm considering buying a laptop that has a BIOS lock on it for a good price. I'm reasonably certain it isn't stolen because the seller is a refurbishing company that buys computers by the pallet from companies and has sold about 20 of this same model laptop without bios password locks.

According to HP the bios password can be reset by removing the main battery and clock battery and powering up off of the wall charger IF the extra security mode hasn't been enabled.  If that's the case, the password is flashed into the bios chip and HP says you have to replace the motherboard.



There are some people on ebay selling replacement bios chips for this laptop to remove the password lock for $25 and it appears to be just a small so8 serial flash chip.

Those chips from what I've seen, seem to use MOSI MISO SCK to access the chip which is good for me since that's something I'm somewhat familiar with programming AVRs.

Back when PC motherboards had removable DIP flash chips, you used to be able to hot flash a chip by booting another computer, pulling the BIOS chip, dropping in the blank or donor chip and flashing the BIOS for the target motherboard with a flag to force the flash even if the model didn't match.

So I had a couple of ideas on this.  One would be to buy the replacement bios chip and perhaps lift one of the legs of the onboard bios while it is still on the board so that it won't function and use some micro grabbers and wire to link the replacement chip in to get the laptop to boot, then set the leg back down and try to reflash it.

If that works, sell the bios chip I bought on ebay.

Another option would be to somehow get a copy of the flash file and try to program the chip without removing from the board. 

How would you go about this little hack?  It somewhat reminds me of when Mike was hacking the Xray machine to remove the password.

What do you think? Are most so8 flash chips just SPI or are there other kinds?

[Stonent]

Nevermind I guess, someone snapped it up.

[amyk]

It might not be the BIOS chip itself; a quick look at the schematic reveals 2 SPI flash chips, and this model also has a TPM. More likely the password is in the latter, in which case resetting will be difficult, to say the least...