Question

Is There a Way To Block or Prevent A Hard Drive or Partiton from Getting Formatted.

Asked by: montecarlo1987

Hello. I have a question. Is there a way to block or prevent a hard drive and/or partition from getting formatted by accident? ..especially if you have data that you never want to getting wipped off? This saved data that I would not want to get deleted would be on a non-system hard drive, on the first partition of a two partition hard drive. Either a setting or configuration within Windows XP and Windows Vista to block or prevent reformating a hard drive or specific partition? I have Windows XP Home and Windows Vista Ultimate if that matters. ...or is there 3rd party software that you can recommend that can prevent or block formatting a hard drive or parition? Is it possible through some changes through the System Registry to block formatting with specific hard drives in one's computer or specific partition available on both operating systems? What are the steps? Please reply with solutions and/or links to solutions. Thank you!  

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Asked On
2007-10-30 at 13:54:10ID22928300
Tags

drive

,

hard

,

prevent

,

formatting

,

from

Topics

Microsoft Windows Operating Systems

,

Computer Hard Drives

Participating Experts
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: cuziyqPosted on 2007-10-30 at 14:03:40ID: 20181106

What you need is block-level write protect support.  And wouldn't you know it, Microsoft Windows is the only operating system that doesn't support it :-).  Macs can lock a partition, and UNIX can mount a partition read-only, but in Windows, no such facility exists.  The only way to accomplish something similar would be to remove write permissions from the root of the drive, but that would only keep you from deleting things by accident.  It won't stop you from reformatting or repartitioning.

 

by: zephyr_hexPosted on 2007-10-30 at 14:06:41ID: 20181135

there is no such functionality.

partitioning and formatting can be done outside the OS, so any settings or configurations in the OS are not foolproof.

3rd party software will have the same issue as trying to do this at the OS level... since formatting and partitioning are usually done at a lower level than the OS

your only option would be something hardware or firmware based, and this isn't something that is available on the market.

you can do some tricks with the system files on your computer that would make it more difficult for someone to initiate a format from within the OS... but like i said... most formatting is done before you even boot into the OS.

 

by: garycasePosted on 2007-10-30 at 19:00:43ID: 20182467

As noted already, you can't do this on the same system.   What you CAN do, however, is to keep a large data drive on another PC (or a NAS device) and share it over your network as Read Only.   Then you can only modify that drive from the PC it's physically attached to.   Assuming that's not your "normal use" PC, you would (I'd hope) be very unlikely to ever accidentally modify the disk partitions or contents [assuming you'd only be using it when you wanted to copy more data to it;  do some housecleaning; etc.].

I keep all of my music, video files, photos, etc. on a dedicated "server" machine that any other PC in the house can access ==> but NOT modify [except the HTPC can add videos to one drive].

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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