Thought it would be a case of removing the CMOS battery. Apparently these shits don't have that. Any ideas?
The Maintenance and Service Guide is a good place to start, and apparently HP bizarrely no longer hosts it on their own site for this model.
edit: that doesn't seem to be that helpful actually, unless you know the answers to the security questions for the bios password reset. An SMC.bin file may be necessary to do so.
Great place to start, I would be looking for jumper pins to short
googling around suggests this is a motherboard replacement issue, but you may be able to re-flash the BIOS with a BIOS clip thingy. Also found https://bios-pw.org/ but I'm not sure if that would help.
re-flash could be an option. atm im thinking i might be able to install OS on the ssd separately, then boot from it, then there seems to be software that could reset it, not sure if that's true or if it would work since for some reasson it won't let me boot from a USB as is. bios-pw.org seems pretty great but unfortunately the laptop won't give me a code to put in there.
Oh yeah - installing the OS to the drive in another machine could do the trick - that's a good idea
