Pffft

Every week an average IT dept will have to pull the drive from any number of laptops to get data from corrupt OS or forgotten BIOS or OS passwords. Most now don’t remove the drive if it’s just a password thing, saving the industry millions*.

Once the hardware becomes physically compromised you’re shovelled.

Things like EFS / OCS and proprietary full HDD encryption work well, but the fact is, users can’t remember passwords. Period. Allowing users to encrypt their own data is career suicide.

Laptop self destruct is a better principle, have them explode (or at least smoulder a little) if a DC is not contacted within 5 minutes after power-on. On a grander scale, have hard drives with programmable pins on the SATA / IDE logic so that if the pins aren’t connected in the correct order, the laptop self-terminates.**

Stopping people getting BIOS resets, beep codes or manuals is just silly. Imagine your sky plus not allowing you to record “Last of the Summer Wine” ? - you’d probably just stay up.***

*Probably.

**Wishful

*** Tentative