Patent ID: 8296554

Claim:
A method comprising: determining, by a basic input/output system (BIOS) of a computer system, on pre-boot, whether a removable storage device is attached to the computer system, wherein the computer system comprises a host operating environment and a manageability engine (ME) that operates independent of the host operating environment to recover the computer system on authentication; determining, by the BIOS, whether the computer system is in a locked state; if the removable storage device is detected, transferring, by the BIOS, control to a pre-boot authentication (PBA) module stored on the removable storage device to interact with the ME to restore the computer system from the locked state to an unlocked state; and if the removable storage device is not detected, shutting down the computer system by the BIOS if the computer system is determined by the BIOS to be in the locked state by querying the ME and no other PBA module to restore the computer system from the locked state to the unlocked state is detected by the BIOS.