So today I opened the box that came from an ebay seller yesterday. Inside was my new (well, new to me) Thinkpad T510.
I run my computer from a flash drive install of Linux Mint. The whole show is on the flash drive, the internal hard drive doesn't come into play at all. So my first move was to access BIOS and set USB devices to boot first if available. Or that's what I thought I was going to do... turns out it had already been done.
Finally, somebody who is a person after my own heart, and I have no idea who it is. And the person is across the country anyway.