Quote Originally Posted by dmedici
I am interested in this topic - though not from the point of view of cracking and stealing, but more from rescuing friends from locked computers, et al.

my question:

...does LINUX have a way to beat the BIOS password? Because now that I have my passwords set in BIOS, what else do I have to do to prevent that from being penetrated?
The BIOS is a small program in an EPROM on the motherboard. By design, it is the first program the CPU runs when the computer starts. The BIOS configuration determines which devices (floppy, CD, hard drive, network, etc.,) the CPU looks at to continue the boot process, and the order they will be accessed. Since the BIOS runs before the CD, Knoppix cannot defeat a password protected BIOS which doesn't allow booting from the CD.

[Added 8-2:] Oops, I should have read all the posts before I wrote this. Of course you could simply boot the hard drive in another computer, or reset the BIOS, but I assumed the cracker wouldn't have that kind of access. That's really a pretty unreasonable assumption on my part.

Might it be possible to write some sort of .exe which, when run from the OS (Windows or Linux,) essentially has the CPU run the boot sector program on the CD, effectively bypassing the BIOS? I don't know enough about the design of the computer at that level to say for sure, but it seems possible.