[FDE] hard disk p/w protection - secure?

[Garrett M. Groff]

My Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop has an option that is settable in the BIOS that allows me to set a password on the HDD (separate from the user and supervisor BIOS passwords). Cursory reading into this leads me to believe that the password is actually written to the HDD, so removing the CMOS battery or otherwise resetting the BIOS will not bypass this protection. Transferring the hard disk to another machine will similarly fail to thwart the password protection. I realize it's not encryption by any stretch (and therefore off-topic), but how secure is this password protection? Speculation aside, has anyone had experience using/bypassing/testing this feature? If so, can you tell me how secure or insecure this password protection is? I'm not necessarily looking for an airtight solution for this particular machine, but if it's completely useless from a security standpoint, I'd like to find out.

Thanks,

Garrett
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