This past weekend we had our nephews over, and they of course swarmed to the computer for messenging, games, etc. I have some throwaway video and audio clips they like in a temp folder, but I also have 2 HDDs in the box.
Disaster, thankfully, was averted by chance.
My wife and I use the second drive as a “special” storage device. wink-wink-nudge-nudge.
Now, I know there’s a way to lock it down with a password, but never looked into it too far. (If this is easier, 'splain it like I’m 4)
What I’m looking for, so we don’t have yet another password to lose, is a way to keep the drive from being shown in My Computer. Or Windows Explorer. I know it’s an easy enough thing to do, but I’m overthinking it and need some help.
So, how do I keep that HDD from being seen by anyone that doesn’t know it exists?
You’re just asking for trouble granting access to a PC with private info. that could be embarrassing. Someone geeky enough will check the last played history, see a spicy clip and go looking for the drive or the file. A bored geek may even take the top off.
Get an external USB drive that you can remove and lock up when company comes.
I bought an external HD enclosure at Circuit City for $25, tossed an old 40GB drive in it, and now it runs like a charm and looks great. Even if you aren’t doing anything naughty, you can use Microsoft’s SyncToy for basic backups of your important stuff, or use a more formal backup solution if need be. Then you can do what I did and give the backup drive to your sister-in-law for safekeeping in case the house burns down: don’t want to lose years of digital photos, do you?
A few things to check:
Make sure it’s USB2 (or FireWire if that’s your thing) and not just plain-old USB.
Make sure it can handle the kind of drive you are planning on putting in it. You won’t get very far trying to put an SATA drive in a IDE enclosure. (mine was IDE, btw).
If you’re running XP Pro you can type gpedit.msc at the Run line, then browse to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Explorer and define the setting for Hide these specified drives in My Computer.
If you have XP Home then you have to use a registry edit to do the same thing. The usual disclaimers apply – don’t mess with the registry if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Be aware that this provides a very minimal level of security. It only prevents the drive from showing up in Windows Explorer. Anyone can still get to it by typing the drive letter in the Address bar. If you really want to prevent access to that drive then you should physically remove it from the machine and lock it up.
I concur with the external drive. Buying an external drive (instead of an enclosure - which is sort of cheaper but not easier) will let you unplug the thing and hide it away when anyone comes over to play.
Plus, huge external drives are wicked cheap anymore. Gives you a LOT of room for high quality winks and nudges.
I don’t know a whole heckuva lot about this, but couldn’t you also define a separate user account and only grant read/write permissions to those drives or folders to that account? You know, the username Wink, password Nudge account?
This seems to be what I was looking for. I’m well aware of external hard drives, but for a 6GB that I salvaged from a junk system I’d rather not put money into it. I’ll try the link and hope I don’t screw anything up too badly. Thanks.
Use TweakUI to hide that fun HD from the explorer and also create a second user account. Use only that user account for the kiddies, it will effectively manage your bookmarks and internet/video histories from being seen by accident.
Boy, seems like TrueCrypt ends up being the answer to half the computer questions in GQ these days, but that’s the answer I’d recommend here. A pure software solution, and no amount of registry hacking or exploring will expose the contents of a drive hidden with TrueCrypt.
Yup, it was a movie of me and my wife. Oh, wait, no it wasn’t. Never mentioned anything like that. I’d hate to name names and will respectfully avoid denigrating any members of your family that are apparently so pervasive in online porn that they may be on the spare drive. If you want your nephews to view such material of you, I can see the joke at my expense. However our trysts are too hot for even DVD. Yeah, baby!
Imasquare mentioned TweakUI which will do this easier than regedit. I’ve used this method at work to hide network drives, just so My Computer pops up faster.
However, I wouldn’t rely on this method. All it does is hide the drive listing in explorer and related shell dialogs. You can still access the drive any number of other ways. For example, if you hide the D drive, then go to open a file in notepad, and instead of selecting a file, just type “d:” in the file edit box, Explorer will hop right to the drive. Or you can type “explorer d:” into Start->Run or the explorer address bar.
Assuming you don’t have time to move the files to an external drive, for what you want to hide, you really should just power the computer off, pop the lid off, and pull the drive’s power cable (or ribbon cable – whichever is easier). Another possible way is to reboot, go in to BIOS, and disable the drive. I don’t know if XP will detect it on its own or not, but it is worth a try. If it works, that is about as good as pulling the power without having to remove the lid.
Finally, the “correct” solution is to create an account for the kids. On XP, they automatically won’t be able to see things in other My Documents folders. The problem with this solution is it can be a pain in the ass to verify all of the programs work under the new account. If they just come over and play a few games, it is probably easy enough. This solution has the added benefit that none of your history or cache will be available to them. That isn’t true for the other solutions (disabling the drive, hiding the drive, moving the files to an external drive).
Another solution is to disable the second hard drive from the BIOS (and of course password protect the access to the BIOS). There’s absolutely no way to access a disabled HD short of opening the computer case.
The only downside is that you’ll have to restart the computer to re-enable the HD.
