i was working on a amilo d which had the same problem. I contacted support centre and they told me i had to make an appointment in order to reset the chip with the password in it. On a other site i read it would cost 150 dollar.
I thought i first try to remove the cmos battery which is located under the keyboard. it didn't help. My eye felt on 4 dipswitches. As i looked on the mainboard two switches were deactivating the passwords. the first is for the boot password and the second is for the HDD. I put the first on to deactivate (off) and rebooted the laptop which smoothly booted
I entered the bios and put the power on to off and the problem was solved
for those who have the same problem