My kid bricked his A1 messing with partitions

OK, here's what happened:

My kid has had his A1 for a couple of months, and he recently installed ubuntu with dual boot. That worked fine. Then he decided to take ubuntu off, so he "followed the instructions from some website" to delete the linux partition and extend the XP partition to recover the disk space. Sorry, he (and therefore I) has no idea what URL he got the instructions from...

Anyway, now the A1 asks for a HDD password at boot. He SWEARS he didn't install a password to the HDD.

F2 prompts for a BIOS password, which he also swears he didn't install.

He's tried every password he can think of, with and without caps lock on.

I found this post http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/07/flashing-bios.html and was able to boot the A1 from my USB key and upgrade to the 3308 BIOS, however it still prompts for HDD and BIOS passwords.

When FreeDOS is booting from the USB key, it complains that it can't read the partition table from the HDD -- I don't know whether this is because the partition table is trashed, or because the HDD is unreadable since I don't know the password.

In my dream scenario, there would be some magic I could work that would reconstruct the partition table and remove the passwords so that the machine comes up to its existing XP configuration. A reasonable plan B would be something that at least gets me through the BIOS password and gives me access to the HDD but not its data. Then I could partition, format, and do a clean install.

I used to own a PC repair shop, so I have no problem doing scary things if that's what it takes. For instance, if I can get access to the partition table & someone with a working A1 can post the correct entries I can easily rebuild the table by hand. But I need to know what to put in there...

 

If the hard drive is locked with a password then you won't be able to unlock it and make it usable without the password, so most likely you'll have to replace it.

For the BIOS password, there was a bug which caused passwords to be saved in upper case no matter how they were entered, so perhaps your son knows the password but wasn't entering it in upper case. But in any case, I should think you can get rid of the BIOS password, but you'll have to open it up, there are instructions which may help here.

 

I know how HDD locks work; the password is stored on the HDD platter in an area not available to the OS. On boot, the HDD requests the password from the BIOS, the BIOS gets it from the user and then passes it to the HDD. The HDD firmware validates the password it's been handed and, if it matches, allows HDD access.

But here's a situation where no password was installed and yet the BIOS is asking for one. So, I'm wondering: Could it be possible that the BIOS thinks there's a password on the HDD but there actually isn't? If that were possible and happening, the BIOS would ask for a password and hand it to the HDD. The HDD then responds "Not a match" (because the actual password is null and so nothing except another null can match it) or the HDD responds with an error code along the lines of, "You gave me a password but I'm not locked". In either of those cases, the BIOS doesn't get a response saying "Success" so it assumes "fail" and denies access to the HDD. Yah, this presumes there's one or more bugs in the BIOS.

There's a complication to this whole thing, which is this: The left button on the A1 trackpad is broken. It still works electrically, but mechanically it's crooked and rattling loosely. Since the unit is still under warranty we'd like to send it in to get the trackpad fixed. So I don't want to open the case and risk the warranty if I don't have to. But will they take it if it won't boot? When I ran my repair shop, I'd have been leery of doing a partial repair like that...

I guess the thing to do is to see if they'll take it under warranty for the trackpad repair, and then if they do we can attack the password/HDD issue after it's fixed... Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll offer us a swap

 

Hello,
Check the service manual.There are some information about how to remove the password
http://dustin.howett.net/AspireOne_Service_Guide.pdf

 

toffe82, thanks for that link. Any idea where I can get the utilities mentioned on page 29? 'Cause that looks like exactly what I need...

 

Try this http://mamas86.wordpress.com/2008/07/29 ... au-laptop/
I didn't test it but it seems there is no virus and should be ok to use (the password is mamas86)
Let us know if it works

 

I downloaded those utilities and they didn't help. The problem, I think, is that they are for a different BIOS version or something. Because the messages I get from the A1 are not the same as the messages shown in the maintenance manual pdf. BUT, that turns out to be unimportant, because I found something else that DID help.

I had to visit some rather unsavory websites, but I ended up at http://www.11a.nu/software/bios-pc-bios ... e-toolkit/ where I downloaded their "BIOS320.EXE" utility. This claims it can figure out passwords from various BIOS, but the part I found useful was the option to simply dump the CMOS contents as ASCII. And, whaddaya know, the string "MUFFIN" was in there. So I tried it and, yup, that worked for the BIOS and HDD passwords. Now, the kid swears he never uses "MUFFIN" for a password so how it got in there I dunno.

Interestingly, with the passwords cleared I ran BIOS320 again and "MUFFIN" is still in the CMOS, so maybe it's a backdoor password?

Now that I've got the passwords cleared out, though, I still can't boot. I just get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the corner, and the HDD LED blinking continuously.

However I can access the HDD, so I can poke at it a little. And what I see is that the partition table is screwed up, and the boot sector is also (maybe) screwed up. I think it's fixable, but I need to know what they're supposed to look like.

For instance, the partition type is set to 12, which is Compaq's hidden maintenance partition. Well, we know that's not right! It should be 7, for NTFS. And it's not marked active. Those things are easy to deal with. But now when I look at the boot sector tables, I find that the entries for FAT and Root Directory are all zero. This may be normal for NTFS? I dunno.

So, what I'd like (if someone is willing) is to see what the partition table and boot sector tables look like on a normal, running 120GB A1. I use the freeware ptedit.exe program from Symantec (formerly from Powerquest) which can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_u ... ptedit.zip -- it runs in DOS mode and requires a mouse so you'd need to set up a bootable flash drive with a mouse driver and ptedit on it.

If someone could post or email screenshots of what those tables look like on a normal A1 I'd appreciate it. If there are no volunteers, I'll have to see if they'll let me boot the display model at Microcenter from my USB drive and look around. I'm guessing Microcenter wouldn't exactly be thrilled about letting me do that...

 

couldnt you go through the ubuntu install again and maybe it will fix the boot sector presuming you have a external cd drive he used to install ubuntu initially

 

He used a Windows installer because our USB CD drive, for whatever reason, isn't seen as bootable by the A1.

 

Here is the info on my AA1 150GB system set to dual boot with XP and Ubuntu

As you can see my first partition is ID 12 also. That is the recovery partition on our systems.

Code:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         637     5116671   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda2   *         638       11386    86341342+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           11387       19457    64830307+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           11387       19122    62139388+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6           19123       19457     2690856   82  Linux swap / Solaris

 

I should note that my original partition before installing Ubuntu was basically the first two partitions only. The NTFS partition just took up all the space after the recovery partition.

It really sounds like your two original partitions might be mangled.

I take it you can't boot from the recovery partition and reinstall XP that way?

Try booting an Ubuntu livecd of your choice. I believe one of the bottom items in the boot menu is boot from HD. It might either boot the recovery partition or possibly XP.

 

I can boot from my thumb drive, and that's it. I've got a USB CD drive, but the A1 doesn't see it as a bootable device. It does see it once it's booted into XP, but if I could boot into XP right now I wouldn't be posting

But I'm hopeful -- If I can figure out what the original partition table looked like, I can rebuild it; if the data's OK it should all come back. I'm not a linux geek, so I'm not sure precisely what those numbers you mentioned i your last post mean... I understand ptedit's display, but it uses chs numbers. I'm pretty sure if I set up the original size for the recovery partition, and then set the rest of the disk as NTFS I stand a good chance of recovering.

But is the maintenance partition the same size on a 150GB (yours) as on a 120GB (mine)? I can make a good argument either way.

Here's what I see in ptedit:

Code:

              Starting                 Ending                   Sectors
Type   Boot   Cyl      Head  Sector    Cyl    Head    Sector    Before    Sectors
12     00     0        1     1         1023   254     63        63        234436482
00     80     0        0     0         0      0       0         0         0

This shows that the whole drive is set up as the recovery partition, but the second partition entry (which isn't set up) is active. What's interesting is that if I change the first partition to Type 7 (NTFS) and active, and change the second entry to all zeroes, after a reboot it's been "fixed" back to this. So something is patching it back.

I need to figure out what the other entries should be for a "normal" 120GB drive; then I can load those up and try them out...

 

Here is mine. Obviously I had more partitions afterwards, so that last sectors count would be bigger on a normal 150GB machine for that last partition.

Code:

              Starting                 Ending                   Sectors
Type   Boot   Cyl      Head  Sector    Cyl    Head    Sector    Before    Sectors
12     00     0        1     1         636    254     63        63        10233342
 7      80     637      0     1         1023   254     63        1923345   172682685