Recently received two ThinkPad T42 laptops ( some company decided to upgrade its IT and were giving away them almost for free ). After turning them on got an 271 error and later was prompted to enter password.
It seems battery was dead on both of those laptops and when its dead, real time clock goes bananas and you are asked for supervisor password to set the clock again ( if supervisor password was set ).
Offcourse nobody knew anything about what password it was. So had to figure it out myself how to solve this situation.
On ThinkPad T42 SVP password is stored on EEPROM chip 24RF08. One thing that sometimes work and was reported by many T42 users is to short pins 3 and 4 of 24RF08, procedure:
- Short pins 3 and 4 of 24RF08, keep them short
- Tun on ThinkPad
- Press F1 to go to BIOS
- If asked for password press enter
- Go to Security – Passwords – Supervisor password
- Release shorted pins
- Enter new password, save and reboot.
Then go to BIOS again and disable SVP password by entering the password you just saved.
Like they say – “it worked on my two t42 machines” 😉
Worked like a charm! Thank you so much. I found one of these locked with the SVP password and didn’t want it to go into the landfill.
Nice ! 👍