Reading Security enabled HD in a USB Drive

[Aristotle11]

Hi,

I want to enable password protection for the HD, so I enabled all the security stuff in the X31 BIOS. When I took the drive out of the machine and attached it to an external USB drive, XP can't even see the drive. How do I see the drive with a password (could I put the drive into an idintical X31 machine and boot it up, or does enabling security chip prevent that)?

What I really want to do is to be able to use the HD in another machine, but only with a password. Basically, I want to be able to get to the data if XP fails to boot and i find myself needing to reinstall XP. THis has happened to me before, and I just put the HD in a USB drive, copied over the imporant data to another HD, and the reinstalled windows from the IBM installer partition.

Thanks,
Aris

[XCoalMiner]

This is an interesting question, I've been meaning to get around to post to ask it.

To summarize: Will native windows USB drivers (XP SP2 in my case) for a hard drive support the hard drive password that a thinkpad sets via the BIOS?

And while we're on this topic, why does the specification (for a Hitachi 7K100) say the password length is 16 words/32 bytes, but on a T41 thinkpad the BIOS only lets you set 12 characters?