Hi,

I didn't know how to phrase my issue better, but that's the only thing that made sense in my head

anyways, i came across a problem. I just built a new system for my sister and brother, and to prevent the neverending fight of what's mine and what's not mine, I wanted to partition the hard drive so that when one is logged on, he or she doesn't see the other partition. In other words, when my sister logs on, she can only use her drive G, and she can't see or my brother's F. It's restricted to her or invisible or something like that. Same with my brother. I made C the partition with windows and other system stuff, that is visible and accessible by both, i guess that's obvious .

I looked around in user account options, but the options are quite limited, and i checked out the drive properties. Partition magic didn't have anything relating to my problem.

Maybe you guys know how to pull this off?

thanks in advance

Well, I don't know how to do this with entire hard drives, but for individual folders you can right-click, properties and click Advanced then select Encrypt from the options. That will encrypt the contents of that folder so only that user can access it. And if you're running XP Pro (don't believe Home can do it) you can enable Quota management, so one user has an unrestricted quota on the partition/drive, but the other user has a 0 KB quota (meaning, no ability to write to that drive/partition at all).

I know that System Commander is capable of hiding partitons and drives from an os. But you would have to have seperate installations for each person on the system. So your sister would have her own install of windows and so would your brother and so on.

You can set drive permissions just as you would files, they may still be able to see each others drives but would have limited to no access, depending on the set permissions.

You need to disable simple file sharing to display the 'Security' tab in the permissions of files/drives. You can do that by going to windows explorer -> tools menu -> folder options -> view tab -> uncheck enable simple file sharing (at the bottom)

I don't recommend changing the permissions on OS's drive.

Ohh and the above method only applies to NTFS drives. You can use the 'convert' command to change FAT drives to NTFS

hmm but would it affect the file sharing on the network. because my brother sometimes takes stuff from my computer. so both drives are set to shared access

1. Run >> "diskmgmt.msc"

2. Right-click drive which you want to hide.

3. click "change drive-letter and paths"

4. Remove access to the drive from alphabet assignments.

5. And mount the drive in an empty NTFS folder - in the correct user-account's "MyDocuments" folder.

So now, if E: has been mounted as "C:\Documents and Settings\nvtool\My Documents\My files", only when nvtool is logged-in that drive is accessible from a folder within his Mydocuments folder. The other users simply don't even *SEE* that drive - but it exists, and no need to fiddle with NTFS permissions or such things. I suppose this is kind of what you wanted?

Do post back how it goes, and if you want more details.

well i tried what you said. it kinds works. but drives disappear in "my computer". both of them, no matter who is logged on.