Sharon, you have a extremly difficult problem.
Why is the laptop in for repair, is the laptop faulty, how do you know the hard drive is faulty when you cannot start up the laptop?
It appears that you have or someone has set up a power on password and possibly a password protection on the hard drive.
If you hard drive is faulty it is highly unlikely that you cannot retrieve any data off your hard drive with or without the passwords.
IBM ThinkPads laptops store the Power On password on an EEPROM chip and removing the BIOS battery cannot clear this password. there are no backdoor passwords that you can use. The passwords are used to prevent unauthorized access to the laptop and its data.
If there isn't a password on the hard disk, and the hard disk is not faulty, you can remove the hard drive and connect it to a working computer to read and copy off your data. I suggest you connect your hard drive using a USB hard drive adapter and connecting it to a working computer's USB port.
IBM states that if you don't know the Power On password, therefore you cannot get into the BIOS to remove the password, and you need to replace the motherboard (this is not cheap).
There is a way to hack into the laptop, it required some electronic experience to build a reader device, dismantle the laptop, solder it to the EEPROM chip, connect the output to a working computer, run a reader program, locate the password from this data, unsolder the wires, put the laptop back together and boot up and enter the password.
For detailed information go to
www.allservice.ro/forum
I have successfully removed these passwords, it is a lot of work, and needs to be tackled by an experienced person.
Best of luck.
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