Is it possible to password-protect a drive without encrypting it? I bring my computer to a lot of LAN parties, and just recently I realized, "What if some kid popped in a liveCD while I ran out for food or something and thought it funny to mount my drive and mess with my data?"

I'm not really worried about professional hackers or something getting into my data, so I don't really want to hassle with encrypting the whole drive (the guides I read on it led me to believe that encrypting my ~80gb of data would take quite a while, and I cannot stand my box being out of commission for more than an hour or two, tops). However, I would like to know that random kids are locked out.

Thanks ahead of time for any responses.

Anytime thought of setting BIOS to not load from a CD This could stop a kid from messing with a LIVE CD and password protecting a BIOS Pretty much easier then protecting a harddrive. This way a kid would have to put your box apart and take your harddrive

Hi.

You'd probably be better password protecting your BIOS, and setting the boot options to only boot from the hard drive. That should keep live CDs out.

I'm not sure about LiLo, but you can also password protect GRUB, so that you can't boot without the password.

The combination of a locked BIOS, and a locked GRUB should be enough to keep out casual crackers.

Dave

Oh wow, I didn't even think of disabling CD booting and the BIOS. Whoops!

Thanks, guys. :P

(By the way, LILO does have a password-protection feature and I have enabled that, too.)

Don't forget about diskettes either, since you can boot from a diskette and mount everything just as easily as you can wth a liveCD.

Then, if you ever need to rescue your data you can just re-enable CD booting from the BIOS.

You guys still have diskettes? Funny, I do also, but here (Slovenia) you have to ask for a diskette unit to be installed in your new computer, otherwise you just get a USB thumb drive (used to be 16MB, probably more now) with your new computer. How silly is that, people will soon forget about diskettes and they will only be displayed in museums :P

Good thing that you mentioned USB drives. Make sure you disable the ability to boot from USB if your BIOS allows it.