Advent 7110 bios password hell

Having a good grasp of computers afriend from work gave me his laptop to fix, Advent 7110. He said hecould not get passed a password that had suddenly appeared. Thinking hemeant his XP logon, It should have been a 5 minute job to clear it.However, it seems to be a bios password. The laptop boots up and thepassword box appears. Tried the Phoenix back door passwords....PHOENIX,phoenix, CMOS, BIOS......no joy. Tried to boot up from a multiboot cd(crammed with diagnostic tools and password resetters) but bios must beset to boot from hdd. Password box won't let you do anything. Thoughtabout removing the cmos battery, googled to find a manual for theAdvent 7110, can't find one as yet, then started reading threads aboutPC World and passworded bios set ups......arrrrrgh. Don't know how toproceed. Surely resetting the cmos jumpers will remove this password???????? If so, still need a manual....back to google.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Feel all alone in the dark.