(Not sure if this is the correct forum for this assistance, if it’s not, guide me to the right forum and I’ll delete the post here)

Hi, corporate slave here!

It’s my first time doing a job, in a large telecommunication industry, but my field is machine learning. I was a CSE student in college, but as we all know, it doesn’t mean anything.

However, as a computer enthusiat, I have experimented a thing or two. Not hacking, but PC recovery, harddisk cloning, HDD to SSD cloning, swapping systems, retrieving data on HDD without signing in, and proudly I will state, I have cloned Lenovo to Dell (Lenovo’s disk is difficult to mount and boot on a different system). Dual boot linux and windows, erased my boot directory from terminal and had to recover and reinstall OS, I have experimented some stupid things on my Personal PC with proper care and zero fear of corrupting or losing data.

I thought I knew a lot about PCs, but joining a work industry opened me to a whole new world of system, encryption measures, bootlocks and whatnots. Enterprise wifi different from this perosnal wifis we see in places, which I didn’t even imagine existed. Logs of every mouse movement I make and keys I press uploading to industry server at real-time, if connected to internet. If not, then logs saving locally, non-accessible by us, and then later uploading to server when we go online. Summarising, I fear using my Work Laptop, let along experimenting a thing or two on it, it’s a machine I don’t understand at all.

Now to brief, it’s a Lenovo E14 laptop, ryzen 7 5825U, 1gb radeon mobile graphics, 500 gigs of ssd and 16 gigs of ram. Not a beast, but better than the junk I have that I call my personal laptop. Now, only if I could play subtle games on my Work Laptop when I am at home. Cause all this power is wasted on work, when we are processing everything on cloud, not utilising this PC’s power, it’s a miserable waste.

To protect company’s data safety, this work laptop comes with built-in security measures and locks. I can’t even plug my USB, it doesn’t read data or even show up. I can’t open Local Disk C, without admin privileges which only our IT Team has. To install anything, we have to call our IT Team and get it installed by them. And in this PC, I want to play games, but if they want their OS to not leak data, then I won’t bother, but what if..? I booted my own OS from a different drive?

I have an external 1TB USB-C HDD lying around and I was wondering if I could install OS on it and boot up my machine from that disk, not affecting my work disk at all. Will my work know that I booted from a different disk? Will there be log of it there?

Like I said, external plug-ins are disabled on this PC, so I wonder if my SSD will even show up in the first place (even from the bios boot menu). There’s a BitLocker at startup, not sure if it’s linked to kernel disabling bios menu, or if it’ll go away if I manage to set boot startup priority to external drive and boot Windows from there. I have heard that at kernel level, there’s no logging, so me plugging in drives or making changes should not maintain logs at bios level, if I manage to access it somwhow.

I don’t know what I am talking about as well, it’s just something that’s been going on in my mind. If somebody understand what I am talking about, please guide me if I can somehow use this Work Laptop for my personal use without corrupting the work disk and without alerting the concerned people at work.

Thank you for the patience of reading it through! And appreciate the help in advance! 🫡

(Edit: Title says SSD, I meant HDD*)