For good or for bad, I just bought a lot of five HP T740 with locked BIOS ($30 each). I think this will be enough computer to run a small XCP-ng system to replace my big noisy and hot servers, and well as bring UEFI boot to that part of my lab (three old HP DL360p Gen8).
Does anyone have experience flashing the BIOS chip (or password chip) to unlock these? I have a programmer, and have used it to unlock a Prodesk 600 G6 that I messed up, so I'm somewhat familiar with the process. But where is this password stored? On the Prodesk it was on a separate chip hidden under the fan shroud, and I'm wondering if the T740 might have it on the back side of the board.
I do have 3 other T740 that are unlocked, so I can get "clean" versions off the chip for a differential if needed, and maybe even just grab the unlocked version, and blast it over the locked machines. No, I don't believe you can just remove the battery or short a jumper, the seller could have doubled his money if he could unlock them, so pretty sure this takes a programmer or some other magic software to unlock it (that HP no longer allows us to have).
Any help would be appreciated.
Back to the Prodesk 600, it was under warranty brand new out of the box, had bad keyboard that got the password entered missing a key twice, but the key started working again when I tried to set it up. HP would not take it back, would not provide an unlock tool, only telling us to send it back and pay for a main board, or buy a mainboard and replace it ourselves. We run somewhere close to half a million USD through HP every year with our refresh cycle, and they still wouldn't help unlock it. Once it got old enough where I didn't care anymore, bought about $35 worth of programmer and some clips, soldered an adapter for the clips, and fixed it. If this is the first time you're reading about this, and have a locked HP, do some searching with duck duck go, or some other search tool that won't hide the information from you, lots on Youtube as well.
Does anyone have experience flashing the BIOS chip (or password chip) to unlock these? I have a programmer, and have used it to unlock a Prodesk 600 G6 that I messed up, so I'm somewhat familiar with the process. But where is this password stored? On the Prodesk it was on a separate chip hidden under the fan shroud, and I'm wondering if the T740 might have it on the back side of the board.
I do have 3 other T740 that are unlocked, so I can get "clean" versions off the chip for a differential if needed, and maybe even just grab the unlocked version, and blast it over the locked machines. No, I don't believe you can just remove the battery or short a jumper, the seller could have doubled his money if he could unlock them, so pretty sure this takes a programmer or some other magic software to unlock it (that HP no longer allows us to have).
Any help would be appreciated.
Back to the Prodesk 600, it was under warranty brand new out of the box, had bad keyboard that got the password entered missing a key twice, but the key started working again when I tried to set it up. HP would not take it back, would not provide an unlock tool, only telling us to send it back and pay for a main board, or buy a mainboard and replace it ourselves. We run somewhere close to half a million USD through HP every year with our refresh cycle, and they still wouldn't help unlock it. Once it got old enough where I didn't care anymore, bought about $35 worth of programmer and some clips, soldered an adapter for the clips, and fixed it. If this is the first time you're reading about this, and have a locked HP, do some searching with duck duck go, or some other search tool that won't hide the information from you, lots on Youtube as well.
