How do brand laptop manufacturers restrict hard disk drive?

Posted by user176705 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by user176705
Published on 2012-11-28T21:03:38Z Indexed on 2012/11/28 23:06 UTC
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laptop

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bios

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system-reserved-partition

I'm curious to know, when I bought a brand new laptop there are limitations to create or change the HDD partitions, except the following partitions:

c:\ drive (Main partition + OS drive) NTFS. 400 Gb.
Recovery drive NTFS. 15 Gb.
Tools drive FAT32. 2 Gb.
System drive NTFS. 0.3 Gb.

My questions are:

How do manufacturers restrict HDDs ?
What is the term for these restrictions?
Can this be applied to desktop PCs?
Is it possible to modify the restrictions by an end-user?

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