How to write-protect a hard disk.

[alternate]

Is there a way to write protect a hard disk? In particular, if I want to preserve the data on it and if I don't need to write to it anymore.

[Pentium100]

Some SCSI hard drives have a jumper setting that enables write protect.

[classicsoftware]

You cannot write protect a drive that Windows runs from. Windows will need to create temporary files that NEED to be written to disk.

Do you want to protect certain data files? Please tell us who uses this system and how they log in. There may be other options

[alternate]

The whole drive contains only data and no operating system. It's basically a huge floppy disk that is non bootable that I use to store personal data on. Of course I run windows from a differenet hard disk on the scsi hard drive. The data hard drives are 7k SATA.

[classicsoftware]

Please tell us who uses this system and how they log in. There may be other options

You need to answer this question first....

[alternate]

I don't really consider the hard drives part of my system, as I can take the data hard drive to my parents' house and hook it up to their hot-plug SATA ports and let them see pictures and even leave it there. They log in however they do... usually the windows button that reads 'log in'... sorry. Um, they log in as administrators in the OS, if that's what you're asking.

[classicsoftware]

This is an external USB Device. Here is the deal. If you rt click on all of the folder and change them to read only, anyone with administrative privileges can rt click and take it off......

What are your worried about, accidental or intentional deletion?

[alternate]

It's an internal WD 500GB SATA drive that I might clothe in external enclosure that has external esata port (not necessarily just usb).

I'm worried about both, duh... I would rather not just keep a spare 500 GB HD with backed up data.

But read-only files upon deletion are prompted for by windows if I want to 'delete the read-only file'... as I recall...

[Paul Komski]

If you create one or more NTFS partitions on the drive then you can alter the permissions to only allow read access. You can do this to the whole partition or to individual folders on the partitions and allow the same permissions to be inherited by any objects created in them. You can even encrypt the same data but this is a double-edged sword if you forget the password you are forever snookered.

http://i19.tinypic.com/6fenar5.jpg

[alternate]

My properties box doesn't have the 'Security' tab. Is there a way to make it appear?

[Paul Komski]

SafeMode and Admin for XP Home and Disable Simple File Sharing for XP Pro. I think its quite straightforward for Win2K.

http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2005/03/07/displaying-the-security-tab-in-xp-home-edition/

[alternate]

Got it. Thanks.

In my dialog box, there are multiple 'groups or user names,' such as Administrators (...), CREATOR OWNER, Everyone, SYSTEM, Users (...). I am guessing, but do all but the third apply only to the computer I'm currently on, and the third to both my computer and other computers?

If I set the permissions on one computer, will those permissions remain when the drive is connected to another computer?

[Paul Komski]

The permissions would remain fixed until an administrator on another computer decided to take ownership of the files and change the permissions. These settings are file attributes and so are integral to the file wherever the ntfs partition is accessed from.

You can play around with the groups but maybe the simplest is to just set everyone to only have Read Access. There are a lot of different combinations of options.

As mentioned earlier you can also encrypt files so that only the owner can access them but this can get tricky for all sorts of reasons and is best avoided unless there are particular security concerns and the owner has backed-up the encryption key.