i have a problem here.

i put a password for the bios of my laptop before a very long time and i didnt use it at all so i forgot it. everytime i format my laptop i just press f12 and it asks me to boot from cd and i do, but i cant enter to the bios setup. i installed the ubunto and i hope that there will be a solution for my problem.
so the password is only for the bios setup.
i tried by taking out the battery it didnt work. the motherboard has no jumpers ……
the laptop is fujitsu siemens s7020. bios is phoenix ver. 1.14
thanks.

I did get complete satisfaction.

Tks.

Daniel.

Thank you, THANK YOU, T H A N K Y O U

It took me a couple of tries and I got it OK.

Rolling again.

Tks so much.

If I can be of help. Please let me know

Daniel.

Daniel, you must shut the machine down.
When you reboot (restart) it, the machine goes through it's POST (Power On Self Test) and scrolls through a list of information including things such as the BIOS version, the hard drive and memory the machine sees. Then it will enter the GRUB loading stage. If it does not enter GRUB loading, you would never get to a welcome screen.

What you need to look for is in the UPPER, LEFT-HAND corner of your screen, after the POST completes. It will say simply "Loading GRUB 1.5" or something to that effect.

It is while this message is showing in the upper left-hand corner of your screen that you must press the Esc key.

I'm stuck. I forgot my password.

I "tried" to follow the above procedure, yet, I am unable to "see" grub.

When linux starts to boot, I press ESC and it still loads.

Would it be because I'm using Linux Mint and the panel (starting panel when we turn on the computer) is not the same?

Signe: Eternal Newbee
Daniel.

I believe your looking for this post –> Reset your Windows Password When You Have Forgotten It.

thanking you in addvance Debbie

1. Disable boot from anything except hard disk in BIOS and password-protect
2. Make grub password ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=7353 )

Sorted.

The above shouldn't ever be used unless you really know what you're doing and won't work for encrypted volumes (in most cases you WILL run in to trouble if you set init to a shell, such as the environment not being set up (thus making vim and other editors useless)). Use the recovery mode to properly boot in to single user mode, as it will run through essential init scripts.

On most Linux installs, setting init=/bin/sh will boot with / in read only mode too since remounting it is handled by a init script.

It's called recovery mode for a reason! Use it!

You guys need some serious help. First of all, yes those will work.

If you don't want people to edit GRUB in this way, then password protect it. This guide goes over using encrypted passwords, but plain text passwords are also possible. The idea is to protect 1. booting into recovery mode, and 2. editing the configuration file.
http://www.debiantutorials.org/content/view/40/227/

I also added a comment in there to explain some things.

The will pretty securely cover GRUB. BUT, I know of a way around this. You can boot to a live CD and change the systems /etc/shadow file which contains system passwords. You can replace any users password with another hash. But once GRUB is locked down, going through that process would be pretty painstaking since you can no longer just wipe the root password and boot into recovery mode.

Anyway, how some of that has been cleared up for you.

And to answer Jimmy, there is no way to stop access to the root prompt on your computer (if you have physical access), but you CAN encrypt the hard disk. Then you have to enter a password to boot up at all. There are many howtos on this, but you only want it if you really care about security.