Archive for December, 2004
The Hacker Strikes Again.
Today was just about the crowning achievement in my career as a tech. There was a laptop that came into the shop that had a password on it… not to hard…. the customer didn?t know the password… harder… it had been at another shop in town for 2 weeks and they had no luck… harder still…. it was a Toshiba… oh crap. For those of you who don?t know the main trick of the BIOS password is to take out the battery. (no power means nothing to keep the password in memory) However the trick with Toshiba is that they hard code the password to the CMOS and even if you have it unplugged days it will not reset. So to the Internet I went. I found that there are two possible ways to correct this problem (I am going to get a bit technical here… just to warn you).
You take a floppy disk format it so there is nothing on it, then you use a hex editor to change the first five values of the second sector (the one after the boot sector) to 4B 45 59 00 00 (that is ASCII for key with two 0’s after it). You put it in the floppy drive and when you boot it will ask for the password, you hit enter and it reads the disk and you get in. This didn?t work and I later found out that this little trick was only for older Toshiba?s.
The only other way was to make a parallel loop back plug that resets the bios. So with the boss’s permission I ripped apart a parallel cable and started to work. The pinout needed to be jumpered as such: 1-5-10, 2-11, 3-17, 4-12, 6-16, 7-13, 8-14, 9-15, 18-25. (here is a picture of a parallel cable pinout)
So after about 1 hour of really bad soldering this is what I came up with…
I plugged it into the back of the laptop and booted it and…. bam! I was in the BIOS. It worked like a charm. So now I have a new little toy which will bypass any password on a Toshiba laptop. So that?s my story. Good day.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (5) : Dec 15th, 2004
Entry #100
I was thinking about doing something crazy for my 100th entry but I couldnt think of anything “crazy” to do.
However for all you bit torrent fans out there that are tired of all the uploads you get from ABC client I have a better choice for you. Azureus is awesome. It has auto updating, and more configs than ABC can only dream of. I tried to download a file through ABC and after 4 days it was only %60 done. However with this new one I did the same file (start to finish) in 12 hours. Needless to say I was rather impressed. So try it out for a bit and let me know what you think. Oh and you can just go to www.download.com and search for “Azureus” to download it. Have fun!
I have hidden the word one hundred in this post… see if you can find it. 
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (2) : Dec 9th, 2004
21 inches tall and weights 85 pounds…
Yah its a big boy but I still love him anyway. I am talking about the new 21″ screen that is now sitting on my desktop. We get used monitors at work but the control panel on one of the 21″ ones didnt work. Meaning that it turns on and displays a picture but you can not adjust it to fit the whole screen. Since we could not sell it like that I offered to take it off the boss’s hands and fix it… if I could. After a long while of messing around I found a few resolution and HZ settings that make the picture fill most of the screen. And after trying for 2 hours at getting the part from gateway, its a gateway monitor, found that they have no real parts department. So I am stuck with a broken 21 that half works until I fry the board trying to “fix” it.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (2) : Dec 8th, 2004
snow… snow… and yes more snow.
So for pretty much this whole week so far it has been snowing and its not supposed to really stop any time soon. The sad part about all that is… I have still not made it up to the mountain. I have a pass and all the equipment; I just have not had a day yet to make the 30 min trip to the slopes. I WANT TO GO!! There were plans in the works to go up this weekend however, someone else made plans so I would have to go alone. Which I will if I have to.
As far as work is concerned there has been one company, which has basically been keeping me employed. A Mazda dealership in town bought 4 brand new computers from us, I installed them on Friday and by Monday they were stolen. So last week I went back to Mazda, replaced and reset up all the computers and got the company working again. Thankfully the thief?s did not have access to the server room or they would have been hooped.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (1) : Dec 8th, 2004