You work for a small city IT department and one of your cowo

You work for a small city IT department, and one of your coworkers has forgotten the administrator password to the BIOS of a server and now can’t gain access to the BIOS settings or boot the server. What options do you have that could fix this problem? (Choose three.)

A. Use the user password if it provides access to the BIOS and will boot the server.

B. Try the default BIOS password set by the motherboard maker.

C. Clear the CMOS memory to reset the password to the default or to clear the BIOS passwords.

D. Power down the server, remove all power connections to clear the BIOS memory, and then plug the server back in and power it up.

Solution

A, B, and C. In some BIOS password configurations, you can set a user password and an administrator password. Sometimes the user password lets the computer boot but won’t let you in the BIOS setup, but on other occasions, the user password will do both. The purpose of an administrator password, then, is to have a single administrator’s password for the BIOS of all computers or servers in your infrastructure and let you set different BIOS user passwords on each computer to be used by the individuals directly responsible for those machines. If you forget the required BIOS password, sometimes the default BIOS password set at the factory will still work. If not, you can remove the CMOS battery to clear the memory, which will either reset the BIOS password to the factory default password or completely clear the BIOS passwords so that you can enter the BIOS setup without one.