How to hide a partition in WinXP.

[CougTek]

One computer, one hard drive. Daddy wants to have his own Windows installation that his kids can't access. Daddy wants to have a Windows installation just for his kids so they can screw it up with their kazaa/lamewire P.O.S. and not affect daddy's own Windows installation. Both installations must be hidden from each other.

Another technician where I work said System Commander could do the trick. He ordered it, but couldn't set it up. I still have to try.

Except for buying the kids their own computer, how would you do this? Anyone here has first hand experience with System Commander (I don't)?

 

[LunarMist]

I used to run XP and 2000 that way a few years ago. It seemed to work OK, but I don't remember the details. All partitions will be visible with a utility such as PM so the kids could will mess up the the system if they are computer savvy. Of course one could always use removable drives or some drive switch, but that is messy as well.

 

[mubs]

System Commander or Boot Magic (provided along with Partition magic) can do the job.

Both will present a menu on boot that lets you pick the OS/partition you want to boot. The menu selections can be password protected and can default to a selection after a time out, both of which you can set in the options. Based on the selection you make, they will make a primary partition active and hide the other primary bootable partitions at the same time (if you don't want them hid, that is possible through an option).

Both require a bootable, DOS compatible primary partition to work (FAT/FAT32). This is the only downside to these programs. In your case, you would have 4 primary partitions on the drive: a DOS FAT for the boot selector, one for the dad's XP, one for the kid's XP and one extended (if required) for the stuff common to both XP installations.

They are both quite easy to set up; I've used one or the other for about 9 years. But both are for pay. I'm sure there are open source / freebie tools that do the same thing, but I don't have info on them since I have both SysCmdr and BootMagic.

 

[ddrueding]

Quite a while ago I saw a key-switch that would switch between two IDE drives, I can't find it now, but it sounds like the perfect ticket (doing it in hardware is more reliable than in software)