Hillhacks – Hacking and Making in the Himalayas

   The next step was to figure out how to crack off the
   security password so that the machines could be usable.
   This basically meant figuring out the supervisor
   password to get into the BIOS and removing the 
   protections. I should mention here that since I owned
   these machines, this is all perfectly legal. There are
   some standard tricks to getting into the BIOS such as
   removing power to the CMOS (battery backed SRAM) to
   clear the settings or certain maintenance key combos
   that act as a universal reset. Unfortunately these
   didn't work. Lenovo actually has a dedicated EEPROM
   which retains its settings even after power is removed
   and stores the supervisor password and other info in
   encrypted form.

   After trying out various techniques, I found one that
   worked. For this particular laptop, you had to open it
   up and expose the motherboard. After that, it required
   removing a modem board to get to the security EEPROM.
   Once the EEPROM was exposed, there was a technique where
   you had to turn on the PC, hit the ThinkVantage button
   to go into BIOS, and then immediately short the I2C pins
   (SDA and SCL) on the EEPROM with tweezers. This would
   cause the security software to crash and allow access
   into the BIOS.

That was an interesting account, faced with a similar proposition I wouldnt know where to begin or what is safe. In fact I have a compaq laptop whose hard disk's firmware promptly auto-generated a random passwd and locked it up ! Apparently its a known bug. If you havent set up a hard disk password before the bug kicks in, you are pretty hosed, unless manage to pull off tricks such as these.

Link to the website is here[0]. This certainly looks like an awesome event to attend.

[0] http://hillhacks.in/