Please help - Totally locked out of T61

Question

Bottom line:
I am totally frozen out of my T61, stuck at the BIOS. I can apparently do absolutely nothing, including access info on the primary HD or the secondary HD in the DVD slot.
I now get this error after the laptop recognizes my fingerprint: <Error 0199 - System Security. Security password retry count exceeded>
The BIOS settings are at the bottom of this post, if that helps.
The only possible things that I know of that you could use to help me are:
The Lenovo does actually recognize my fingerprints, which apparently means zippo.
My two Windows administrator passwords worked find until this locked me out totally.
I do have hardware so that I can attach these two hard drives to other machines, where I have been able to read/write to these drives, at least until now.
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HOPEFULLY RELEVANT HISTORY.
About a year ago I remember exploring the password functions on my T61. Probably getting too cute. But it never bit me on the butt until now. I am beginning to realize how much I didn't know then, learning today that there are 3 different passwords IN ADDITION to my Windows password. Oops.
It appeared today that my biometry hardware is getting dicey. Sometimes it would recognize this finger, other times not, sometimes that finger, then not. So I started wandering around in the security part of CSS, trying to see what I would have to do if the biometry froze up on me completely. 
That is when I discovered that apparently I created a supervisor password. Apparently much worse, at one point in the last 5 hours of trying to figure out what was going on I typed in what I thought might be the correct supervisor password too many times. 
My backup plan was apparently misguided and has failed - I have a second HD, with one of the partitions a bootable WinXP partition, but when I swap in that one (normally in the DVD slot) for the primary HD, this error STILL crops up and I am still frozen, can't get past the BIOS.
Smelling possible disaster, I was in the process of backing up all of the data on that HD to the second HD when my machine went into hibernation before it totally locked me out! Agh agh agh. It had filled up about 50 GB, my hope is that what I truly need is now on this secondary drive.
Rant: I can do NOTHING?! This has totally frozen me out of EVERYTHING? My T61 is TOAST? This is really me, the one-and-only-ever owner of this laptop, probably no one that was stupid enough to try to steal this semi-obsolete laptop could have screwed this up so totally. My incredulity is high. Doesn't anyone remember the reason for the UNDO function, or the purpose for "idiot proof"? I am close to dropping this Lenovo on its head to see if it has a change of heart or giving it ECT treatment, which would be equally helpful, but mostly thinking about buying a different very non-Lenovo laptop, yesterday. If I screwed up once, by thinking that more security was better than less, this machine should be more forgiving than this, especially if it recognizes my **bleep** fingerprint. At least Dell hardware was reliable, even if I couldn't understand tech support. Enough rant.
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Any help humbly and gratefully accepted. I'm going to go blow off some steam but keep checking here to see if any kind soul will be merciful. I have just wasted too many hours that I needed to be spending on getting ready to teach on Monday. If I need to bail on that ****** laptop totally then it would be very helpful not to pour more hours down this rat-hole.
Thank you,
- Befuddled, with blood pressure rising
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Using passphrase          ENABLED
Supervisor password    ENABLED
Lock BIOS      ENABLED
Set min. length  12 characters
BIOS password at unattended boot      ENABLED
Power-on password     ENABLED
HD1 password             User+Master
HD2 password             Disabled [this is my secondary HD in DVD slot]
Password reset  service            ENABLED
Status               IN PROCESS
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Answer 1

Well I have a lot of success to report and a big mystery still unresolved.
I'm typing from my Lenovo!! I'm able to get into Windows, access all information (fingers crossed) on my hard drive, and found out that I had succeeded in backing up most of my important information to that secondary drive.
Before I reply to and digest your last two posts I need to take a sharp detour to want to make certain that I have successfully backed up everything off of my primary HD, and then I will come back here and report. So it will be a while until I post again, maybe even a few days because I have to catch up work that didn't happen today.
But I wanted to let you know what happened and what worked.
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This is how I succeeded in getting into my system.
First and possibly most importantly, I was documenting every step that I was taking in order to report in here, and so by doing that it occurred to me, "Why this step?" and not another.
These are the steps that I recorded in order to show that I kept getting to this 0199 error no matter what I did.
    > Turned on machine normally
    * It prompted me to "swipe finger to authorize access"
    > Swiped finger
    * It showed and skipped the 'power on' and 'hard drive' passwords, since I had successfully figured those out
    * It shows me a nasty looking screen saying:
          ERROR: 0199 System Security
          security password retry count exceeded
    * Press [F1] to get into setup utility
    > I press F1, get into setup utility, which is a total dead end where I can affect *nothing*
If I then reboot the whole process recycles
What I did that got me out of this mess was to press <Esc> instead of [F1]. It occurred to me that I didn't have to press F1.
Eventually, once the system got through some momentary confusion, mostly based upon the fact that the secondary drive wasn't hooked up, I got into Windows.
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So I am going to log out for a while until I feel reasonably secure that I have backed up my data. I will come back here to follow up, because I don't think that this 0199 error is going anywhere.
Also I think that I hit "this resolved the problem" by mistake a second ago on your last post. If I did then that was a mistake, because it would be better to do that for whichever one of these posts would point people best in the right direction. Would you help me out with that? Since you are the moderator you will have a better sense of that.
Of course it depends on how you define "the problem"! Getting back into my data, programs etc. certainly does seem like the real success. But this 0199 error is a real problem.
Should I split off a different thread about the 0199 error?
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All of that said, hip hip hooray!
After a touch of exuberance I will get my nose back into the tedious work of backing up my machine.