Originally Posted by
oldbeefer
Fitted with W10, the HDD died. I put a new one but on boot, straight after the Advent logo it asks for a password. Tried the old trick of removing CMOS battery, but no joy. Tried the google suggestion of wrong password 3 times generating an error code which can be decoded, but it doesn't do that. Any thoughts please?
Hope I'm not teaching granny etc. A PC boots up into its BIOS from an onboard chip (stage 1), then depending on the settings within the BIOS it look for a device to load up system software (stage 2) unless you stop it from doing so. BIOS and operational software are two different things on two different media.
I presume the laptop was running ok and for some reason you decided the hard drive was faulty and you have replaced it (Stage 2) normally. I think you have to ask yourself why is stage 1 now corrupt? Changing the hard drive should not cause a boot up problem. The BIOS runs up and looks to see where to go for it's system software (normally the hard drive but not exclusively) - are you sure you've installed the hard drive correctly? When the laptop is booting up from power on keep tapping the f2 key all the time the laptop is trying to boot - as in my experience sometimes the boot up sequence sometimes does not see a single key press. Try powering on the laptop without a hard drive in it at all and see how far you get.