Steve B

Just going to add a few bits this to help others after spending most of the Sunday trying to unlock the administrator access to the BIOS on an Asus UX330UAK after a member of staff decided to lock it up when he left the company and was not happy in providing the password. First of all, the Alt + R did not work on this laptop for some reason. Tried all manner of things as a standard user in the BIOS but could not get it to boot into recovery as this was locked down. The answer turned out to be to update the BIOS. This can be done by manually downloading winflash from the Asus website, then download the firmware that is specific to your laptop (take great care here) and finally flash it from the Windows Install. It will reboot and flash the BIOS which will then suddenly allow Alt+R to be used. Winflash can download the Bios firmware from the Asus website but it kept reporting corruption in the download hence why its best to download the correct image yourself. Then Alt+R shows the current days date and asks for a code...for me it was 2018-03-11, I used the code for 2008-03-11 and bingo, into the BIOS as administrator. Hope this helps others.