Thinkpads Forum

A couple of days ago my T41 was stolen at Munich airport. Although I had the security chip activated, I unfortunately did not have the Client Security software installed on my machine; I did, however, secure my hard disc with a password - it had to be entered right at the beginning of the booting process. Do you think there is any chance of the thief logging into my computer? The BIOS was not password secured, but I suppose one would need the hard disc password to deactivate it in BIOS, right?
Thanks for your help.

Zweibel

Oh, and buy the way. I now have a brand new T60 and am very pleased with it. However, there appears to be a little black shaddow in the bottom right corner. Has anybody experienced the same problem with a T60?

Also, there is sometimes some kind of pieping noise coming from from the fan - is that normal?

What was the password? Was it something at least 5-10 characters long, not a word, and had numbers and stuff?

The ONLY way to do anything with that hard drive is if it said guy had access to the drive makers interface hardware, and was able to flash the drive into bypassing the password, or found out the HD master password. The password is stored on the platters, and even with a swapped circuit board from an identical drive will not allow the thing to boot. Its pretty [censored] safe.

Is it a flexview screen? Are they teeny tiny things at both far bottom corners that extent upwards of about 1/2cm? Those are normal and just an oddity of the lighting on these screens.

Beeping is a power management thing, which can be lessened by disabling the power management inside the bios under the power config settings.

I think hard drive will be ok - password had numbers and was 6 characters long.

What is a flexview screen? I have a 14.1 inch screen.

Yep, pieping is much better now, thank you.

This raises a quesion. Can you clone the disk with the password on when you want to back up your hard drive? I was going to do a clone to save my hard drive content. But if the password scrambled the data, and when I reinstall the contents, would the restored partition still function?

Rwang wrote:This raises a quesion. Can you clone the disk with the password on when you want to back up your hard drive? I was going to do a clone to save my hard drive content. But if the password scrambled the data, and when I reinstall the contents, would the restored partition still function?

The hard drives don't scramble anything. It is written to it just like any other drive. The only difference is a non-data section of the platters that is reserved for internal stuff only has the password written to it. Once unlocked you can clone it just like any other drive. But if you don't unlock it, the drive will barely report itself to a computer, and do nothing else.

Very nice. So, if you stick the locked hard drive to a USB external enclosure, people who steal it cannot read the contents of the drive?

Never leave your thinkpad out of your sight even for 1 second.

The external drive will NOT work, as the HDD only recognises your thinkpad machine and your assigned password to it unless the thief is an expert in HDD password cracking.

Zweibel wrote:{Snip} I did, however, secure my hard disc with a password - it had to be entered right at the beginning of the booting process.

Did you set the "user + master" password together or only set the "user" password?

Zweibel wrote:Do you think there is any chance of the thief logging into my computer? The BIOS was not password secured, but I suppose one would need the hard disc password to deactivate it in BIOS, right?

No, unless the thief is well versed in HDD cracking. Yes, if you want to disable your HDD password, you need to log into the BIOS and enter your current HDD password to be able to unlock the HDD "user" or "master" or both passwords.

yes, my T60p has the corners shaded in both bottom corners, i assumed it was somewhat normal?

allen wrote:yes, my T60p has the corners shaded in both bottom corners, i assumed it was somewhat normal?

I phoned Lenovo and they told me they would have a look at it - it a common thing I think. I don`t think I`m going to bother after all - can`t stand it being without a computer.

please let me know what happens if they decide to come look at it... strange we both have, i wonder if others do and just havent mentioned it like me, i have the IPS too, and you don't right? strange.

allen wrote:please let me know what happens if they decide to come look at it... strange we both have, i wonder if others do and just havent mentioned it like me, i have the IPS too, and you don't right? strange.

there`s a own thread on this topic here I noticed. Have a look under "Dark shadows -- Reprise"