How secure is my Hard Disk?

My Mac Mini was stolen, along with my gorgeous 20" Cinema Display. Disappointing to say the least.
Anyway, the insurance company is being really good (so far) and will be replacing my Mac in a week or so.
What I want to know is how useful my stolen Mac will be to whomever eventually buys it from the low life theif who took it?
Can the HDD be reformatted without the root admin password?
Also, as the serial no. is registerd to me through the Apple Care protection plan I had, can Apple disallow that Mac from ever being updated with System patches?
Whilst I admit I was a bit lax on the whole system security front (never envisioning that someone would make off with the whole box), the lessons I've learned that I hope may be of use to some of you out there.
1) Switch on disk encryption. Losing the data is bad, but having bank a/c and website credentials hacked will be much worse
2) Require authentication on boot up
3) Use your .mac membership to keep updates of everything in a remote site. This might seem costly, but the loss of ALL my digital photos is the one thing that truly bites. I had a huge firewire external disk I backed up to religiously, but that was nicked too.
I'm sure many of you can add to this list.

Can the HDD be reformatted without the root admin password?
Yes, unless the computer has an Open Firmware password set on it. Anyone having a Mac OS X installation disk compatible with that computer can change the administrator account password, and from there can change the root password.
Also, as the serial no. is registerd to me through the Apple Care protection plan I had, can Apple disallow that Mac from ever being updated with System patches?
No.
Having an Open Firmware password set will block attempts to reboot from a CD or start up from a disk other than the one specified in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences. Turning off automatic login from either the Accounts or Security panes of System Preferences will reduce the number of possible methods of breaking in to a system protected by an Open Firmware password.
(12998)

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How secure is my Hard Disk?

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