My sis-in-law loves a bargain (she's from Yorkshire!) and recently rang to ask me (via her sister, my wife) if I'd be able to recover a laptop she'd been offered, before she went ahead and bought it.

Apparently the owner of the laptop had forgotten the Windows password and had written the laptop off as worthless, so was willing to sell for next-to-nothing. I said yes, I'd able to do something with it.

What I didn't realise was that it might have a BIOS password, which it did!

Initially I'd thought it would be as simple as sticking in a Windows install CD and building from scratch. However, without the BIOS password I couldn't change the boot order of the disks to get it to boot from CD.

I tried Google and there's lots of complicated hacks out there, as well as BIOS removal tools for sale. None of the hacks worked for me. Nor did stripping the laptop down to hot-wire jumpers or remove the CMOS battery (which was un-removable).

Then I had a brainwave.

The Simple, Fool-Proof Solution

If you find yourself wanting to boot from CD on a laptop (or PC for that matter) where you can't modify the BIOS try this:

1. Remove the hard drive
2. Insert the Windows install CD
3. Start the laptop
4. Hope that BIOS fails-over to the CD after not finding a hard drive
5. If it boots from the CD, while that's happening, quickly re-insert the hard drive.
6. By the time Windows is ready to install the hard drive will be there
7. Remove the old disk partitions and start afresh

Hey presto. Worked for me. Hope it helps somebody else.