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It has been suggested that for security reasons it's a good idea to change the boot order to prevent booting from a live CD or USB. But if you lose the passwords to unlock hard drive and bios, and you cannot boot your laptop from live CD, are you in trouble?

How can you even wipe and restart your machine?

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If you remove the boot from CD and USB from your BIOS boot order it does increase security. Anyone cant easily drive by boot your machine when you are not there and copy all your hashes and sensitive information.

If you lose your BIOS password there is usually mechanisms to reset the BIOS back to default. Usually this involves opening the machine and using a "jumper" to short circuit two pins.

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It should be noted that resetting the BIOS is very easy. It just requires taking the battery out of the motherboard for a minute. On a desktop that's very easy, although a notebook that requires some disassembly. – Dracs Oct 16 '11 at 3:56
On laptops, it can be easy as pie, or it could depend on the alignment of the moon with the fifth order of Mars. I've run into Lenovos that are extremely difficult to reset the bios. – g3k Jan 2 at 20:10

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