Dell inspiron 8600. Now that I have crossed the 2 pins on the motherboard which was very time consuming & removed the tags and password I get a grey screen saying the hard drive is password protected. Now what do I do?

You can try removing the CMOS battery, or replacing the entire drive, and starting fresh. This may actually be a CMOS Password. You can also try:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/CmosPwd

I disconnected the cmos battery like you said. I had to reset the time. It still goes to gray screen, says I need password to hard drive. Can the password be retreived? I can install my Dell windows xp operating system cd and it will load everything up and then it says cannot find fixed disc or hard drive. Does this mean I can replace the hard drive and reinstall operating system?

Well thanks for the help. Today I went to staples and bought a new hard drive. Installed the Dell xp operating disc and a couple hours later I was up and running. It would have been nice to have retreived all my information from the hard drive though.

Sometimes you can't save what you want... Good luck