I just got my hands on a Thinkpad X60 tablet for a killer price on craigslist. Trouble is that it's completely locked down with either a Power on Password or a Supervisor Password (I can't tell which). The machine's legit - the person that sold it to me used to own a company and one of his salespeople set the password before leaving the company. It's been sitting in the owner's garage for a couple of years, and he just decided to get rid of it rather than fix it himself.

The password is stored on an 8-lead EEPROM on the mainboard and can be read serially by connecting leads to two of its pins and ground. It's stored in a strange format that requires some additional Windows software to parse. I found someone that has used an Arduino to extract the raw data here: http://arduino.ada-language.com/recovering-ibm-thinkpad-t42-bios-password-with-avr-ada-and-arduino.html and his repository's here: https://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/arduino-thinkpad-bios/src .

My problem is that I don't know the first thing about the Ada language. It seems like it needs to run in a Linux environment, and I'm not too proficient with Linux yet (working on it). I'd like to stick to Windows for the moment because the data parsing tool runs in Windows. Does anyone have any idea how to do what he's doing using the Arduino's native C code?