Remove password on a very retro Toshiba T4500

By Cèbe, . Permalink Retrocomputing

I expected it would be as easy as removing the batteries -- which is a must anyway on those old laptops because battery leaks are just another name for time bombs. Surprisingly for tech that old, the password doesn't seem to be stored in volatile memory. Let's dig!

In the maintenance manual, it is said:

Deleting the Password

For security reasons, the Password Deletion Disk will not be distributed to Service Providers. You
must obtain the current password from the computer's owner to service the machine.
If the owner forgets the password, contact your Toshiba representative for further action.

Means there is a way to remove the password with a special floppy disk. Digging further, there are indeed ways to remove passwords on very old and very very very old Toshiba laptops. Of course one challenge is to make sure the floppy drive works... On those old laptops, drive belts have most likely disintegrated. But first let's see what the disk should be like... This is a copy of the article in case the original website goes down:

This method works on ancient models (386 and 486 vintage probably.) This is what you need:

  1. Your notebook
  2. An empty formatted diskette (720 kb or 1,44 mb)
  3. A second computer (e.g. a DOS desktop PC)
  4. A hex-editor (e.g. Norton DiskEdit or HexWorks)

This is what you have to do:

  1. Start the desktop PC and start the hex-editor
  2. Put the disk in drive A:
  3. Change the first five bytes of sector 2 (boot sector is sector 1) to: 4B 45 59 00 00
  4. Save it! Now you have a KEYDISK
  5. Remove the disk from drive A:
  6. Put the disk in the notebook drive
  7. Start the notebook in Boot Mode (push the reset button)
  8. Press Enter when asked for Password:
  9. You will be asked to Set Password again. Press Y and Enter.
  10. You now see the BIOS configuration where you can set a new password.

This, unfortunately, doesn't seem to work. At no point in time does the PC triggers the floppy drive, meaning the procedure might not work for the 4500 family. Toshiba 4500, 4600, 4700, 4800, 4900 models are actually rebadged Compal computers.

Page top