removed harddrive

[mr.big]

if a laptop is stolen and the crook removes the hard drive. If a new hard drive is installed, can prey still track the laptop via the serial number?

[francoi...@yahoo.com]

No it needs the hard drive. You supply the computers serial no to your local police. I doubt if it will help. Prey should make that it should run off of the computers Bios.

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---

From: "mr.big" <taurean...@gmail.com>

Sender: prey-s...@googlegroups.com

Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 09:26:30 -0800 (PST)

To: <prey-s...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: prey-s...@googlegroups.com

Subject: [Prey-Security] removed harddrive

if a laptop is stolen and the crook removes the hard drive. If a new hard drive is installed, can prey still track the laptop via the serial number?

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[Taurean Dennis]

perhaps if the bios is EFI based, this might be possible.

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[Drew Reece]

Mr Big,
Nothing can be tracked by serial number on the internet, but if the Police may recover it & the serial number is the only way it can find it's way back to you.

Prey in BIOS - it adds an extra layer of complexity, but I agree it could be good.
The many variants of BIOS's would all need custom handling. The system would need to get Prey installed if it had been overwritten so it would need to detect the new OS type & install the relevant Prey version. The Control Panel would need to provide a method of setting up Prey with the same ID (this may already exist since devices get re-associated to the correct Control Panel account). It doesn't seem trivial.

Can't the BIOS be reset fairly easily if you have physical access? i.e. Older Macs can have RAM removed to do this, I think there are similar flaws in other systems. Users would also have to be careful when a manufacturer pushes out firmware updates, Apple do this occasionally, I'm sure others do too. Search for 'defeat BIOS or reset BIOS' & you get a lot of options.
I'm assuming if you locked the BIOS with a password (to prevent booting from other media) a thief would have to defeat that before they could install the new OS (or pre-install the HD on a similar system).

There was also talk of getting a form of Prey into recovery partitions, so that a reinstall should get prey installed too, but that also seems too dificult to be practical.

If anyone can program something for the BIOS feature I'm sure the Team would consider merging it.

Drew

[francoi...@yahoo.com]

Hi Taurean

I personally think that prey should work from inside the bios. So if the thief s remove the hard drive and reformat it should still be able to contact the prey server and work as normal.

But most bios systems are not compatible is not compatable with it.

I live here in South Africa and had three computers stolen in two years. At a cost of R 14000 per computer. I think the thief s remove the hard drives and re-installed other hard disk.

Regards,

Francois

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