I forgot my BIOS password, how do I get into my machine?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #25, I talk about the way that BIOS passwords are set and why
they are often not recoverable. In short, you need to remember your passwords,
and backup your data.

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Reset BIOS password

Unfortunately, you may be out of luck.

I’m going to have you start by getting in touch with or checking the support site for Samsung for that specific model to see if the BIOS password can be reset. It cannot be reset on some machines. I just don’t know if this is one those machines.

It’s a security precaution. If somebody had physical access to your machine, and they could reset the BIOS password, that’s pretty much as good as having no password at all. So many BIOS do not let you reset the password. Thus, if you forget the password, then you’re out of luck. You cannot get back into that machine.

Recover your data

• Now, you may be able to recover your data.

In a case like this, one of the things you can consider doing is taking the hard drive out of that machine and putting it in a USB enclosure. That way, you can plug that hard drive into another machine and access the data on it anyway.

• Now, that assumes that what you have is, in fact, a BIOS password and not a hard disk password.

If it’s a hard disk password, putting the hard disk in another machine won’t really help you very much. You may still be out of luck.

But that’s the direction I would send you in:

1. Start with Samsung. See if there’s a way to reset the BIOS password on that machine.
2. If there is not, then recover the data or attempt to recover the data by installing that hard disk into an external enclosure and placing it in another machine.