>>Anybody know of a way to password protect a partition in W98? This is in a peer-to-peer setup and I have shares defined for the partitions, which have a password, but how do I protect the partition from the local user's accessing it directly?
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>Under Win98, I don't know of a way to protect things from a local user, short of resorting to a third party package that does on-the-fly encryption and decryption of drive contents; local resources aren't restricted once you log in directly, since you can completely bypass any security set up with things like the System Policy Editor by doing things like going into Safe Mode, or simply cancelling the login process.
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>Privilege restriction on a user by user basis might be doable in a domain or with Share-Level security using a NetWare server to provide authentication, but not in a peer-to-peer environment with Win9x.
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>You can use the System Policy Editor to block access to things via Explorer (you can hide drive letters for example) if User Profiles are enabled, but you can still programmatically access the local resources. If you really need to secure stuff locally, you'll be much better off using NT.


Thanks for the reply, Ed. Norton Utilities used to have such a thing back in the DOS days, but I don't see anything like that for W9x even in NU3.0. I'll have to look into the System Policy Editor and User Profiles. I don't need "secure" access. I've just got some things stored on a couple of partitions on my kids' computer because they have the biggest hard-drive! I'm just trying to prevent them from "accidently" deleting things.

They've got the bigger hard drive, because when I went to put together a system for them for X-mas, the smallest drive I could buy was 11GB. For $239, I figured "What the Hell! I'll just use some of the extra space myself. Hence, my looking for some kind of "protection".

Thanks again.