Some suggested options to the shorting technique for stubborn chips. One is to leave the board and the CMOS Battery connected and the AC Adapter plugged in for a day to charge the CMOS Battery. On the C800/810/840 and Inspiron 8000/8100/8200, that will mean the Palmrest must be left plugged in both to charge it and also for the shorting, as the CMOS Battery connects to the board through the Palmrest connector. The second option is to use the  Mod shorter, put the pin point in between pins 5 and 6, turn on the board and then move  the point back and forth between the pins with 1-2 second pauses between moves. I have used this 4 times, on a Latitude D600, an Inspiron 2200, an Inspiron 8200 and a C810, so it was no fluke.

I had occasion to try a last ditch measure when I could not clear one particularly difficult chip to Manufacturing Mode; this was a recommendation from a Swedish Engineer. I unsoldered and lifted Pin #8 clear of the contact on the board. That eliminated the Passwords AND the Service by locking them into the EEProm chip. You can not set a Password on such a board and you will not have a Service Tag, but it works.

Insp 1150
on the bottom side and not far from the RAM slots. You will need to remove the board from the bottom plastic chassis, use 4 double ended screws from the ports on the back(or spares)as temporary anchors for your HeatSink screws to hold it in place to prevent CPU overheating while you do the job.

The C800/810/840 and Inspiron8000/81000/8200 chips are all in the same location; the C610/Inspiron 4100 are the only one using its specific location although the C640/Inspiron 4150's chip is fairly close.

C810
The chip is under the edge of the Fixed Optical Drive Guide and accessible by removing the Keyboard(4 screws and the connector), the Power Switching board, and the Guide frame(2 clips and 3 screws) The chip will have a "24" in the type number, is 3x4mm in size with 8 connector pins

Inspiron 600m - the bugger (24C04) is under the PCMCIA.

D510 under some black tape

CPX It is on the motherboard bottom to the left of DIMM A

Inspiron 8200  It is underneath the Tray/Chute for the Fixed Optical drive, and very close to the board edge near the Modular Bay's inner end.

A little procedure I tried out that works for folks with an Admin password, the boot order locked with HDD first and the Floppy and CD Drive disabled. I configured a C610 that way and got the Floppy and CD drive Enabled; the boot order was still locked, but the floppy worked OK and by pulling the HHD out of the laptop, I got the CD Drive with the CDR version to boot into DOS and clear the password
Follow these steps
1. Remove the AC and Main battery from the Laptop
2. Remove the screws holiding in the keyboard from the bottom side, and lft the keyboard , but do not unplug it.
3.Unplug the small white two wire connector for the CMOS Battery(green)
4. Lay the keyboard back down but leave the screws out
5. Plug in the AC Adapter, boot the computer and press F2 to enter BIOS. On Page i and Page 2 of BIOS, press and hold the Alt key and press F. If you look on Page 2 when finished, the boot order shoud be set to default, Diskette, Internal HDD, and last CD Drive and all the drives should have an arrowhead to the left end showing they are enabled. There will still be a warning that Configure setup is Disabled at the top of page 2
6. Put  your DST diskette in the Floppy drive and press Esc. The floppy will start rattling and run the diskette.
7. If you need to use the CDR version, pull the Harddrive out and with the CD DRive the only bootable device now, it should also boot into DOS.
Other models will likely have the CMOS battery located elsewhere; for instance on the C800?I8000 series the CMOS battery conects through the Palmrest connector, so unplugging that will disconnect that battery.

D800 I8600I just now discovered a major error in the DellPass doc. The location for the EEProm chip shown in his Photo is dead wrong. That is indeed an EEProm Chip-a 24C256-but it is one for the LAN. The Chip for the Service Tag/Passwords is under the Harddrive Chute as shown in the pics and is a 24C04N. This also applies to the I8500 and Precision M60, as they use the same board

Some additional on the older Latitude_MasterPW software. I bought a Inspiron 3700 with A04 BIOSand it had a Primary Password with the D35B designator. I used the generator, entered the resulting Password and pressed Enter. Again it got me through the Grey screen , but the passwords were still entered in BIOS and the grey screen returned on reboot. So I reentered the master PW, but this time I held down the Ctrl key and pressed enter 3 times. When I entered BIOS this time, the BIOS Passwords were completely gone. I then flashed the BIOS to A17 and the Password system changed to the -595B designator. I then reinstalled the HDD which I had removed and a grey HDD Password screen popped up. DANG!! So I tried a new approach; I force flashed the laptop back to A05 using the /jabil parameter and then reinstalled the HDD and booted up. The password type was back to a D35B password. I entered only the Serial number string of 11 characters-  ***01003716   - and it gave me  4nyc6oun   .I entered that on the grey screen and boom!! the password was gone. My impression is that this will not work with all Dells, as not all of them had -D35B Passwords in their early BIOS versions, but if it only works with a few, that is a help. I also intend to leave the 3700 as-is for trying to clear just HDD passwords

another little adventure this PM in Password cracking. I bought another CS off ebay; this one still had a -D35B Primary BIOS Password. Just for the H*** of it, I decided to try the Latitude Master_PW software again, and entered F54ZA**-D35B. It gave me 8e26cn4f as the only result, I entered it at the greyscreen, pressed enter and ZAP! through the screen and into BIOS. I then tried to disable the Primay BIOS Password by entering it on the Password page, but no soap, it would not work. So I put in the DST file on my little Harddrive in the LT and booted out of BIOS with it and into DOS. Surprise, surprise,the DST software refused to Autoexec, and errored out with an incompatible message. So I manually tried to run  EE-CPA and it errored out as I did not have a battery for the CS. So I tried the command again but added the /forceit extension like we do for BIOS Flashes without a Battery installed. Bang!, off she went  and erased the eeprom chip and the Primary BIOS Password. I then used Asset.com to reset the Service Tag and that worked also; so it is now in perfect working order. This is the first successful use of the Master_PW generator for me, and I have had it for 3+1/2 years.

Info from one of our users:

I found the bios-chip for my, Dell Inspiron 5100 Latop! Your little trick works, btw! (lol) This particular models chip # is: 24LC16B

NOTE:
Chip is located at the bottom of board, next to memory Slot B
I had to literally strip down the laptop to almost nothing, remove both memory sticks, peel off the black labels that read: "SLOT A , SLOT B". & waahlaaah! The chip alas... Its worth all the work

>Thank you, the 7000 is a matter of only disconnect the battery,

>doing that reset the startup password.

>You could add this tip to your site!

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