Need Help with a Computer Problem

[halojango78]

Hello, you guys were able to quickly help me with one problem already, so I figured this would be a great place to ask for help again. Let me start off by saying that I'm in a Computer Maintenance class for my school, we go around the school updating and fixing computers and other machines for the school.

Recently, some kids have decided to give us some troubles. From installing annoying programs on netbooks to putting passwords on machines, it's been getting annoying with their childish games. Recently, one of them took one of the netbooks and put a password on the BIOS and Hard drive. So when you started it up, you needed to type in a password just to boot windows. You couldn't change the password, since they put a password on BIOS as well. We were able to crack the first password (it was "hello"... that just shows the maturity level of these kids). We then were finally able to crack the BIOS password as well and take off the Hard Drive password.

To stop this from happening again, we decided to put an administrative BIOS password on all the netbooks, hoping that would lockout all other people from putting a password on the Hard drive. Well... it didn't, so that's why I'm here. By the way, the BIOS is an AMI BIOS, perhaps that info will help you help me.

We put an admin password on the BIOS... but by simply hitting the "enter" button on the keyboard on the "Enter Password" screen, they can get into BIOS. From their they can put on a User password, and lock out the harddrive. Not hard, right? We just go into into BIOS with the Admin password and remove the Hard Drive password... yeah... that worked great. Turns out we can't do that. It locks us out of BIOS completely, making it impossible (but perhaps not impossible) to remove the pass or even enter BIOS for that matter.

I am hoping someone browsing through these threads has an idea on what we are doing wrong and/or how we can fix it. We just want to be able to:

1.Remove an Hard Drive password if someone puts one on their
2. Get on BIOS using admin password when someone puts a User password on.


Keep in mind that these are Asus Netbooks, with an AMI BIOS. Any help would be great. If I was unclear in any section or if you need more info, please let me know. It would be great to figure this out. Thanks! :]

-Halo

[kung foo man]

I hope you get some help, I've no experience with NetBooks though.

In my last school we had Tower-PC's with some added hardware-protection. We could change all files etc. but a reboot restored a saved state of the PC. And that state can only be updated with the admin password.

Since the hardware-protection seems pretty non-working for Netbooks, I would suggest a logistic approach: every Netbook becomes an ID, and every pupil needs to use "his" Netbook in a class. So when a pupil makes a Netbook unusable, the pupil in the next class will report it to the teacher (and he can look up who used it before). If a pupil allows other classmates access to his Netbook, he will learn what responsibility means of entrusted school property.

[halojango78]

Thanks Kung. Our school... well... the IT department of our school (which is 2 teachers and 3 students including me) have been pushing for students to purchase their own netbook for school, so we wouldn't have to deal with this junk all the time.

We have done your approach to it, where kids are assigned a netbook number from the cart, but kids never follow it and teachers never enforce it. Oh the fun!

I'm not sure if you are familiar with "Clonezilla". You can make an image of one computer (the settings, programs, names, etc.) and save it to a flashdrive. Then, we save it to a huge HDD which has "images" of all of the computer types in the school (well most of them lol). So if there is a virus on a computer or something went wrong with it, we just put the good image we saved before and let clonezilla run and put it on there. It's very useful and I believe its free. Much easier than the old Derik's Boot And Nuke method, because you don't need to add programs and such. So, if the problem is a simple-moderate issue, we just use Clonezilla to fix it. If you have never heard of it, I would highly suggest researching it :]

[Tally]

Hello, you guys were able to quickly help me with one problem already, so I figured this would be a great place to ask for help again. Let me start off by saying that I'm in a Computer Maintenance class for my school, we go around the school updating and fixing computers and other machines for the school.

Recently, some kids have decided to give us some troubles. From installing annoying programs on netbooks to putting passwords on machines, it's been getting annoying with their childish games. Recently, one of them took one of the netbooks and put a password on the BIOS and Hard drive. So when you started it up, you needed to type in a password just to boot windows. You couldn't change the password, since they put a password on BIOS as well. We were able to crack the first password (it was "hello"... that just shows the maturity level of these kids). We then were finally able to crack the BIOS password as well and take off the Hard Drive password.

To stop this from happening again, we decided to put an administrative BIOS password on all the netbooks, hoping that would lockout all other people from putting a password on the Hard drive. Well... it didn't, so that's why I'm here. By the way, the BIOS is an AMI BIOS, perhaps that info will help you help me.

We put an admin password on the BIOS... but by simply hitting the "enter" button on the keyboard on the "Enter Password" screen, they can get into BIOS. From their they can put on a User password, and lock out the harddrive. Not hard, right? We just go into into BIOS with the Admin password and remove the Hard Drive password... yeah... that worked great. Turns out we can't do that. It locks us out of BIOS completely, making it impossible (but perhaps not impossible) to remove the pass or even enter BIOS for that matter.

I am hoping someone browsing through these threads has an idea on what we are doing wrong and/or how we can fix it. We just want to be able to:

1.Remove an Hard Drive password if someone puts one on their
2. Get on BIOS using admin password when someone puts a User password on.


Keep in mind that these are Asus Netbooks, with an AMI BIOS. Any help would be great. If I was unclear in any section or if you need more info, please let me know. It would be great to figure this out. Thanks! :]

-Halo

You shouldn't worry about BIOS passwords, as simply removing the CMOS batter for 3 minutes or so will wipe it.

Hard drive passwords on the other hand are a significant problem, and are impossible to remove without certain data recovery tools. But their very difficulty in removal is in fact an administrators friend - use a hard drive password to lock these kids out. They will never be able to break the password. The only problem I can foresee is that you wont be able to let the kids boot them up as obviously you wont be able to tell them the password. A teacher or admin will have to do it for them. Other than that, putting on a hard drive password will stop the kids doing it themselves and locking the teachers and admins out.

[halojango78]

We did remove the CMOS battery already once. The bad thing is that these are ASUS netbooks, and the battery is very annoying a tedious to get at. I believe it took two of our guys about a week to remove it, since we had to be so careful on removing it since it was in an awkward place.

I really want to thank you on the suggestion about putting a Hard Drive password on all of the netbooks, and having the teachers turn it on for them. I will suggest it, but it probably won't go through, as most of the teachers here are very "old-school" and hate technology, and would get mad having to do this for 20+ kids every class. All these reasons are why we are pushing for everyone to have their own computer.

Thanks to Kung and Tally for your help, if we ever figure it out I will be sure to report back here. Thanks!!! :]