how to protect data

Hello guys and gals.

I became paranoid after some punk ass kid stole one of my laptops from my truck. I was wondering if there is any way to protect data on harddrive so even if scum will steal my computer he wouldn't be able to access anything.

Also, is there any method to format harddrive if one enters the wrong password three times without scum knowing it's being formated?

Scenario: one being 'nicely' asked to open password proitected hard drive. one enters wrong password on purpose and hard drive gets formatted while program show progress bar of "unlocking" it.

I would really love to hear what you guys use and if there is any utility of some sort that can do that .

Thank you.
BB
p.s. I did search on BHW site but haven't found anything really.

Hi,

... thats an easy task. Use http://www.truecrypt.org/ for that.

steps:
- create a container of your wanted size on your hdd.
- mount it - put your files in
- unmount it - protected

cheers
catman

on my toshiba notebook there's a hdd password, so even if anybody try to put it in another machine, he/she can't access it without this code, i can also boot from an sd card, so without this card, nobody can boot my notebook, you can setup passwords for your windows profiles and if it's not enough you can encrypt data on your harddrive (there's a lot of software to do that), with other tools you can make passwords to certain directories, hide them, in case if you don't want to encrypt the whole drive or if you don't want to encrypt at all, just make them unaccesable to others
or you can buy notebooks with fingerprint recognition system

There are a few devices that try to self-destroy the contents in case of theft nowadays, and of course many encryption solutions. However aside those, if somebody smart enough gets a computer, he can unmount and access the harddisk, it is simply is harder than just turning it on. Older computers & laptops have backdoor passwords depending on model even...

and even if it is formatted, it can still be recovered... try to write on the sectors for best safety

I've set password for bios, restricted booting up only to hdd, set password for hdd in bios. My firefox is running from truecrypt drive.
In Windows 7 you can encrypt the whole drive, so it would not be readable in another laptop.
Also with all this protection online backup of most important files is recommended.

http://www.pgp.com/products/wholediskencryption/index.html

Encrypts the whole disk and requires a separate password to decrypt.

The most important things is to have a BACKUP data on other media (CDR/DVDR, external HDD, FDD, ZIP, etc).

Also, use Folder Hider software for important data, and encrypt it.