Windows XP: Bios inaccessible password, system reboots

ethanwdp

Honorable
Nov 23, 2013
19
0
10,510
Lenovo Thinkcentre a70z
At my school, some little guy was messing with a computer and somebody asked me to help. I took a look at it, and it can't boot properly. I tried "Launch with good settings", the three safemode options, and resume Windows normally. And after the loading bar finished, the computer did a clean reboot. The power LED didn't even flicker. I tried interrupting normal startup, and I tried to enter BIOS. It said "Enter CURRENT Password". The computer did not have a password, you just typed in student and left the password area blank. When loading safemode, I realized it stopped at the driver Mup.sys and did the reboot. There's no errors, anywhere.
 
When you say "messing with a computer", do you mean installing and changing things or trying to fix it before you looked at it?
The BIOS password is different than the Windows password, someone just set a BIOS password to access it.
If you can't start in SafeMode, you either need to try a Repair setup using the Windows disk or do a clean Windows setup. Many times, the issue you are seeing is due to a bad hard-drive, so replacing the drive before re-installing Windows won't be a bad idea.