I'm going to stick this here for future reference, and hopefully help someone else out: My brother has just handed me an ex-NHS Dell Latitude D630 laptop to fix up for him. Only problem is, it has a password set on the BIOS (Dell call it a Setup password). After looking around, I found this site, where someone had reverse engineered the way master passwords are generated for various laptops. It also has a link to this site, which does the hard maths for you. So, you merely type in your Dell service tag (in UPPERCASE) and click the button. You will get several options for the master password, most Dells only use an 8 character password, so ignore the long ones, and to avoid getting 3 wrong guesses in a row, reboot after trying twice. I assume this works for other varieties of laptop as well. Hope this helps someone. (A couple of years ago my boss and I were presented with a laptop that some user had decided to put a BIOS password on, and then forgotten the password, in the end the only way we could think of to fix it was to run a 9V battery across the motherboard to kill it, then call it in as a warranty return to Dell)
(Sorry to necro, but like necromancers of lore, I believe that raising the dead can be done to serve a good cause, in this case dissemination of useful info.) Just had a D630 with a locked BIOS and found this thread via Google, and the linked blog, in more info in the above site, provided a Dell password generator which worked for me and unlocked the BIOS. Saved me sending this board back on ebay
