How to disable format drive support?

[dagon]

Is there a way to disable the ability to format drives without setting any kind of user account restrictions or something like that? I'm looking for a registry key that can be toggled on/off or something like that.

The reason: If I have an encrypted drive that is not mounted the drive is shown in explorer but if you try to access it it says it is not a valid partition and asks if you want to format it. I don't want to have the chance that the drive will get formatted accidently by anyone using the computer, destroying my encrypted data.

nLite has a modification to disable the format support, but I dont know how it is implimented, or if the method it uses could be toggled on/off.....

[seapagan]

Not sure of the answer to your format-disable question, but if the drive is a fixed drive / partition on your PC, you can remove the drive letter of the unmounted drive, using Computer Management -> Disk Management.

Right-click on the unmounted drive, choose to change the drive letter, then click the 'Remove' button. This will stop it appearing in explorer or otherwise. If your encryption software supports mounting by device / partition instead of drive number (eg Truecrypt) this will work fine. You can always add the drive letter back again using the same option.

From memory, it will work for removable drives also, though things may get funky if a different drive letter is assigned.

I do this all the time for my Truecrypt partitions.

I too would like to know how to disable format for individual drives

SP

[gosh]

couldn't you just remove format.com from windows\system32?

Opening format.com in notepad i see it depends on these files:

ulib.dll ifsutil.dll

What happens if you remove these files? Does format run or does it give a dependancy error?

The question in my mind is if disk management calls a file or an api. If it calls an api the best method might be to hide the drive letter as discussed.

-gosh