>>>>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.
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>>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.
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>If your primary concern is accidental deletion, create a separate logical drive for your stuff, and hide the drive letter from the kids using TweakUI's My Computer property sheet, which will prevent it from appearing in My Computer & Explorer by default; you can unhide it locally with TweakUI easily enough on the fly. If you want to be extra careful, flag the files read-only and hidden, so that you have to know the files are there by name, remove the file attributes, and then delete them from the command line. And this won't require the use of the Policy Editor.
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>>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".
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>If you're worried, the 1GB Jaz drives are getting pretty cheap, and the 250MB Zip drive stuff is either on the shelf now, or will be very shortly; I've been using the Jaz drives for a couple of years now. They're fairly fast (5400RPM SCSI drive), and a useful size (I use it to transfer stuff back and forth from work, and I deal with some fairly large data sets at times.) It's a good deal more practical than writable CDs where things are changing frequently. Media is still a bit expensive, at ~$100/1GB cartridge.

I'll look for the TweakUI stuff, that may be the simplest solution for me.

As far as backups go, I saw a really slick product at Comdex in Vegas last November. It was called Orb, and it was a 2+GB cartridge type drive, like a Jaz, but significantly less expensive. Drive prices were $199 for IDE, Parallel, or SCSI versions, and the media was only $29.95 for the 2GB cartridges. Way less then Iomega's prices! They said they should be available starting in January or February of this year. I'm definitely going to look at one of those as soon as I can find one locally. Who knows, they may be able to set a new standard with that kind of pricing, or maybe force Iomega to lower theirs.