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Re: [LUG] 20140828 help please to visualise XP on bricked laptop

 

On 28/08/14 10:01, Eion MacDonald wrote:
7 This is first time I have had a machine with BIOS Locked by a
forgotten or unobtainable BIOS password, and disassembly to remove CMOS
battery is a very long and complex job, I would not want to do.

Others have already replied, but for what it's worth there are *always* backdoors through the BIOS locks: if you're lucky, googling around might find a default backdoor password used internally by Compaq/HP techs. There may also be tools available online to specifically unlock (in the case of a leaked internal tool) or brute force crack the password as well, although both can be tricky to find if they even exist online in the first place. If you had enough clout with Compaq/HP, trust me, they would happily supply you with either the backdoor or the tool.

Failing that, I would disassemble the machine and either trigger the reset jumper or remove and short out the CMOS battery: you say it's a big job, but with a service manual it's not hard at all. It's much better than putting up with a BIOS locked machine anyway. Failing even that, remove the HDD from the laptop and hook it up to any other uncrippled machine and install to the disk from there: Linux will survive being pulled out of the caddy, put back in the laptop and then rebooted in a different machine. It might complain and want to install some new drivers but it will work fine. You can also do that trick with windows, but you will have to sysprep it to survive the move.

To create the VM, as others have said, just use the VMWare standalone converter. If required/desired, you can then always use VBoxManage to convert the result from a native VMWare instance to a native VirtualBox instance, which I imagine you'd prefer. Alternatively, if you search back through the DCLUG archives, a long time ago I posted a complete tutorial for capturing any existing OS install and performing a P2V conversion with nothing more than a linux live medium, some standard tools (SSH, dd, gparted) and VBox. Shouldn't be difficult to find.

Regards

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