IBM ThinkPads could be reset if you beamed a certain radio frequency directly at the BIOS chip. It was documented in the user guide as a feature if you were ever locked out, or the system was no longer booting. It’s been 20 years but I doubt that feature ever went away.
For a while vendors tried to lock down the BIOS pretty hard. Dell might still, I remember having to call and get assistance when a password was forgotten and they had to generate a backdoor key of some sort. Maybe that is less of a thing now that Bitlocker is widely used on corporate laptops and it is sensitive to tampering.
In the past they had jumpers for the same purpose.
IBM ThinkPads could be reset if you beamed a certain radio frequency directly at the BIOS chip. It was documented in the user guide as a feature if you were ever locked out, or the system was no longer booting. It’s been 20 years but I doubt that feature ever went away.
For a while vendors tried to lock down the BIOS pretty hard. Dell might still, I remember having to call and get assistance when a password was forgotten and they had to generate a backdoor key of some sort. Maybe that is less of a thing now that Bitlocker is widely used on corporate laptops and it is sensitive to tampering.