This is what I've been told by a technician far away in another land:

A dude inadvertently put a password into the BIOS, that password was then written to the disk or to another chip in the disk housing (unknown). Then the dude forgot the password or the case sensitivity he used and shut himself out of the machine.

You can't get out of it by formatting the disk because the password is either not on the disk or is somehow protected. You can't flash the BIOS to get out of it for the same reason, the password is still recorded somewhere else and/or that part of the BIOS program is untouched by flashing.

Has anyone ever heard of this!?

This sounds like a way of protecting sensitive data when a machine is lost or stolen. The technician says ASUS have a master password associated with the serial number of the machine, but does anyone know of another way out?

Thanks - rev