Prevent Someone From Reformating XP

[ben_ben]

My next door neighbor needed to borrow my laptop so i decided to let him. When i got it back everything was gone, it turns out his kid reformatted it. It took me multiple hours to get it back to normal and he wants to borrow it again. I like my neighbor so i want to let him borrow it however i don't want it to get reformatted again so does anyone know how to make it so you can't reformat it without a password or something. and you can't recover this password or bypass it??????/

Please help fast!

 

[The General]

Set a BIOS password? That is your only choice, because I could take a Knoppix disc to any PC without a BIOS password and format it.

 

[Disillusion]

I would beat that kid within an inch of his life. There you go, problem solved. Let the neighbor borrow it without the fear of his punk *** kid trying to reformat.

 

[Law]

Give your neighbor a limited account or let him use the Guest account. Password protect the Administrative accounts or any account that is part of the administrators group or owner group if you're on XP Home.

And as General stated, password protect your BIOS and set the hard drive to boot before the CD. Hopefully your computer doesn't have one of those hot key you can press to select which device to boot first.

 

[KingAustin]

My question is why the **** did the kid reformat the harddrive?! That makes me mad and I'm not even involved in the situation.

 

[Dexaroni]

I would request that he not let the kid touch the laptop, and make a guest account and set a password. I suggest you close out the MSdos prompt.

The kid probably learned how to format in school and wanted to show his dad...

 

[TheMajor]

You could still take out the hard disk and format it.

 

[mBernhardt]

I would let him know about the damage his kid caused the last time. I'd also set an ultimatum if it happens again that you don't feel comfortable loaning out your laptop if its going to come back "damaged" every time.

Oh yeah, backup anything and everything you can. Just in case.

 

[killians45]

Set to boot to HDD only in the bios and the password protect the bios. I know old bios you could have only one boot device, thus diabling the floppy and CD boot and I'm guessing you can still do that, but with the way some crap changes I could be wrong now.