Acer Aspire BIOS Password woes - and solution!

Youngest son decided to change password on his Acer and promptly forgot it. That was easy enough to rectify, except that somehow in the process the BIOS password got changed too.

As the next thing I wanted to do was to partition the machine so data won't be at risk when future upgrades happen.

For this to happen, of course, I needed to boot from optical disk to use GParted.

But, equally of course, Acer Aspires don't have an optical drive, so I was using an external one. And the BIOS wanted to chose HDD as its first boot option.

So, easy peasy, back into BIOS via F2 and amend? Er, no... Password not accepted.

But there are only two passwords that it could be (yes, I know, I know). Neither work. System then freezes.

Panic sets in. Until I found this post http://support.bicestercomputers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=292, and the key part is here:

"What happened here is simple and Acer is fully aware of this so called "bios bug" It is not a bios bug, it has been designed by Acer in this way in order to make more and more money from customers sending the devices back. They've designed the bios in a such way as the password you've typed in lower case (99% of the cases) is converted automatically into an upper case one.

For example if your password was "santamaria18" it will now work only if you type "SANTAMARIA18"

Another part of the whole fraud (as I cannot call it anything else) is that the password cannot be longer than 8 characters. Therefore going back to the above example we understand that our bios password "santamaria18" is actually "SANTAMAR". That is a huge difference!"

Tried again - worked first time! Needless to say, the BIOS password has now been safely amended