Reset Vintage Retro Toshiba Laptop BIOS Password With A Key Disk (KEYdisk)

Have you got a Vintage or Retro Toshiba laptop that wont boot as it has a BIOS Password set?

Then what you need is a KEY Disk!...

When you try and enter a password for the BIOS on a vintage/retro Toshiba laptop you may (or may not) have noticed that when you press Enter the Floppy Disk Drive whirs for a split second - well, this is because there is a way to reset/remove a BIOS password on an old Toshiba by using something known as a KEYDisk which is simply a 'special' Floppy Disk and in this blog post I am going to show you how to make one...


How To Make A Toshiba KEY Disk To Remove a BIOS Password Using Hex Workshop

1. First of all you are going to need a Floppy Disk (and a floppy disk drive of course).
2. Next you need to download and install Hex Workshop
3. Insert a blank formatted floppy disk in to your floppy disk drive and then launch Hex Workshop
4. Open up Hex Workshop and from the Disk menu click on Open Drive
5. Select your floppy disk drive (usually A:)
6. Click on the Disk menu and then click on Next Sector
7. Change the first five bytes to 4B 45 59 00 00
8. From the File menu click on Close and then Yes to save the changes

You now have a KEY Disk!

All you need to do now is insert the floppy disk in to your vintage/retro laptop, press the reset button and when asked for a password simply press Enter, your laptop will look for the KEY disk in the floppy disk drive and should then be asked if you want to reset/set a password!

Compaq LTE 5280 Laptop

Picked this up today for just £1!

As you can see it's rather dirty, but better than that - it's Year 2000 Compliant!

It's a lot cleaner on the inside but I'm not holding my breath that it works.

Despite the clean looking keyboard and screen, although it does power on, it doesn't POST and an LED of a tap is displayed indicating possible water damage.

Time to see what the battery and HDD are like (assuming there is a HDD or even a HDD caddy that is)...

The battery has some sort of speckly mess on it and peeking inside the laptop it does indeed look like it has a large amount of water damage.  Fortunately it hasn't spread to the HDD Caddy or indeed the HDD inside:

At least this can be used for Spares and Repairs as once the case has been cleaned up it's actually in very good condition, just needs a new motherboard and well, anything else that is inside!

Toshiba Satellite 220CS

Today I was gifted a great little work-horse of a laptop, namely a Toshiba Satellite 220CS with an Intel Pentium 133MHz CPU, 16MB of RAM and 1.4GB Hard Disk Drive!

The reason it looks like a chunky old laptop is that is exactly what it is - but also, it is sitting on a Port Replicator which came with it:

What it didn't come with though, was any power supplies so neither the laptop or the port replicator can be tested... or can they?  Of course they can as I have an 'of the time' Universal Power Adaptor that has the required 15V connector so, will it power on?

Of course it does!  The only error is that the rechargeable CMOS battery is flat which is no surprise as it hasn't been powered on for a number of years.

F1 to continue... what OS will be on it?

Windows 98ME (Millenium Edition) - the Windows Vista of the 90's!!

Rare Compaq Presario 700 Laptop

You know a laptop isn't rare when a seller tells you it is!  This 'rare' Compaq Presario 700 Series laptop is so rare, that not only did I manage to pick up two of them from two different sellers, I purchased them on the same day!

One works, one doesn't.

Typical with an old laptop, the CMOS battery needs replacing as per the next screen:

On pressing F1 to Boot, Windows XP begins to load...

As this AMD based system only has 128MB of RAM, Windows XP is VERY slow to load...

WACOM Graphire Tablet (Slate Blue) ET-0405-R

Got this little beauty in the post today:

Not sure of the exact age of this device but from the enclosed manual it appears to be circa 2000, so could be up to 19 years old.

It's a serial device that also needs a PS/2 port for power (hence the PS/2 pass-through in the cable).