DriveLock on Compaq/HP Laptops?

whois asks: "I just purchased a new Compaq laptop and noticed a feature in the BIOS called 'DriveLock'. It locks the drive so a password has to be entered on startup. If you take the drive out and put it in a system without a drivelock BIOS, the system can't boot from the drive. There is very little information on the web about this feature. Most people talk about what happens if you lose your password (buy a new drive) and what happens if you want to reuse the drive in other machines (you can't). What I want to know is the tech specs on this. Is it security through obscurity, and just sets a password in the drive BIOS, or is it doing encryption in hardware? My guess is it's the former, but I'm submitting to find out if anyone knows the real story. Here is an HP doc that mentions it in passing." According to information provided by the included links, this "feature" isn't something you can disable, either. Are we likely to see more manufacturers tie hardware together like this, in the future?

Use the fdisk, Luke!

[pbox]

I don't think its something that a new repartitioning (fdisk et al) cannot disable. They probably encode / encrypt the boot sector, but that can be fixed with fdisk. Saying that the drive is not usable in other computers is incorrect.

IBM does this, too.

[Exocet]

My T20 has this drive locking feature and I've been told the same thing - do NOT forget the password or you can toss the drive. When I worked at Intel drives occasionally got tossed when people forgot their HD passwords. They did not attempt a recovery of any sort.

I *think* the 600-series IBM laptops also supported this feature, although I wouldn't swear to it.