Thinkpads Forum

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

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?