How to prevent hard drive wipe?

[Charles_cat]

I am not sure where to ask this, but if I add a hard drive password, will this prevent someone to wipe the hard drive and install an OS from scratch?

Why I am asking is, my laptop got stolen, the guy got caught and I got it back. there was just a normal password on it.
so clearly he could restart the laptop, press F2 of F10 and redirect the startup from a disk and in this way wipe everything to create new accounts and so forth.

To prevent this, thus making the laptop totally useless for the one who stole it, will a hard drive password prevent a wipe?

thanks

 

[saor]

You'll always be able to wipe (format) a hard-drive. Even if you could prevent it - they would just need to replace the hard-drive with a new one and they'd still be able to sell the laptop for a profit.

 

[Zyraz]

Active Encryption on the harddrive (Something like BitLocker) .
This will NOT prevent someone from Wiping the harddrive but IT WILL prevent a thief getting access to the data on your laptop .

 

[supersunbird]

I am not sure where to ask this, but if I add a hard drive password, will this prevent someone to wipe the hard drive and install an OS from scratch?

Why I am asking is, my laptop got stolen, the guy got caught and I got it back. there was just a normal password on it.
so clearly he could restart the laptop, press F2 of F10 and redirect the startup from a disk and in this way wipe everything to create new accounts and so forth.

To prevent this, thus making the laptop totally useless for the one who stole it, will a hard drive password prevent a wipe?

thanks

Nope, don't think so. A BIOS password might prevent the casual thief from changing the boot sequence (which should then have HDD as only boot option) and an encrypted hard drive prevent them from accessing the information on the HDD, and thus it would be kind of useless.