$10 programmer saves BIOS-locked Lenovo ThinkPads from the dump
Many cheap company ThinkPads come with supervisor passwords and often end up as e-waste. Ukrainian YouTuber Hileeq shows how easy it is to bypass the password with a $10 programmer.
Victor Voinea shared a method to bypass the supervisor password on Lenovo ThinkPads, but it generated a random password each time, requiring users to contact Voinea for the specific key. In 2020, Mark Juvan reverse-engineered the exploit and documented it, which Hileeq shared in a YouTube tutorial. The process involves extracting the BIOS from the EEPROM chip using a $10 programmer and NeoProgrammer utility, applying Knucklegrumble's auto-patching workflow, and then flashing the patched BIOS back into the EEPROM.
This bypass removes the supervisor password, making the laptop usable again. Lenovo's firmware verification and driver architecture provides the necessary driver, allowing the EEPROM to be read and written to, and storing the supervisor password in EEPROM memory. Hileeq's tutorial makes the process accessible to more people, potentially preventing usable ThinkPads from being discarded as e-waste.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
