Acer Aspire V5-571-6891: Impossible to crack BIOS password

mistertime

I bought a refurbished Acer Aspire V5-571-6891 from the official Acer eBay page a little over a year ago. It served me well for a few months, then everything went all to *****. BSODs, slowdowns, blackscreens... it took up to 10 minutes to open the Start Menu. I reset it completely, but it was still incredibly slow. I eventually decided to install Linux—only to find that the BIOS has a password on it.

 

Now, normally, the BIOS password would be easy to remove: clear the CMOS or EEPROM from inside Windows, remove the CMOS battery, boot it off a utility CD sort of thing and wipe the CMOS, or even just try some sort of brute force cracker.

 

I've tried every single one of these. And many others. Quite literally, nothing works. Nothing. I cleared the CMOS and EEPROM, it still has a password. I removed the CMOS battery for over 24 hours, made sure every single cap was drained, it still has a password. I can't boot off a utility CD because Secure Boot is enabled, and, obviously, I can't get into the BIOS to change that. I tried various brute force crackers, I've tried dozens of number sequences thrown at me by them. None of them work. If I get the password wrong thrice, the hash changes. It doesn't cycle, it doesn't alternate, there's no pattern. It's completely random.

 

Nothing I've tried so far has worked—and now, to top it all off, my Windows installation corrupted its own BCD. So I can't boot into anything except a Windows 8 recovery CD—which I can't boot into anyway unless I remove the hard drive. And since Bill Gates decided that disk hotswapping was for *nix users, the recovery CD won't recognize the drive until I reboot—and, if you can read, you probably know why this won't work.

 

So, I tried Acer support, and I was answered my an Indian man who said that they 'don't service the Bios.' Evidently, acronyms aren't used in India. The few topics I've found referring to my model of laptop (of which there seem to be about 3 in existence) basically all say, "Ship it to Acer and pay them $100."

 

Um, what? Remind my why the %^&* I should pay the idiots who screwed up my laptop to fix my laptop? Not gonna happen. If I get as single response telling me to do this, I will not be happy. 

 

So, any ideas?

 

TL;DR: If you need a TL;DR, you honestly shouldn't be trying to help me. Now go back and read the whole thing.