From: "Frank Haber" 

>but I have no idea what HD password stuff you mean?

All of the recent high-end (X, A, T) TPs, in addition to the custom
recovery partition which has its own DOS+extender diagnostics, have a
hardware controlled boot procedure.  If you set a hard disk password, it's
custom-burned into the HD, and that hard disk from then on can only boot on
that motherboard.  If either dies, IBM claims you have to buy a new MB,
since the associated encryption chips are soldered on/in.  There's rumored
to be a renegade in Canada who can crack all this for a fancy fee ($200?).

Unknown to me: whether this extends to the R series, and whether you can
hang the HD on another machine and get your data off.  I suspect so.

(There's another issue with very recent laptops of all brands.  Many laptop
HDs ship with *no* jumpers or other provision to set
master/slave/cable_select.  On some, the distributor can burn new firmware
to change this, which does the purchaser of onesies no good at all.  The
machines' BIOSes vary in flexibility all over the place.  I've seen Dells
and Toshibas that absolutely must have their HDs set to !!slave, or no
bootie. (One Dell boots off the slave on the second  channel, by default!))

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5