so... right now i am dual booting Fedora and Windows xp off of the same machine. I would prefer to be all linux, but getting rid of windows is not an option. unfortunately this leaves a big gaping security hole in my system. especialy with programs that will read my ext3 partitions in windows without enforcing permissions (usefull but yikes!).

im looking for a solution to this problem. the only thing i can think of is to password protect my windows partition at boot time.

how do other people deal with this problem? what can you suggest?

thanks for any help.

Hi.

The thing you could do is to get a NTFS partition. Enforce permissions on Windows and let it be read on Linux. Is most likely that you have a security breach on Windows than Linux. You can setup mount permissions on Linux.

Try to use the Lilo or Grub as your Boot loader, then set the password for the boot options, you may try google "grub boot password" for the step-by-step guide(redhat security guide also includes this)