hardwarenubejavaelite Posted June 19, 2006 Share Posted June 19, 2006 Fist of HAK5 rules!!!!!!!!!!!!! Love this show! Ok heres my question: I want to have 2 seperate harddrives. 1 harddrive as a master harddrive, this harddrive I don't want to ever give knowledge to the fact that another harddrive exists accept for when I drop files to it from a shared folder. This master harddrive will be my 300 gb harddrive storing all of my important data. I then want another harddrive to be known to me as my "fun and games" harddrive. This harddrive will be running at 80 gb's and will be filled with meaningless junk. NOw heres the thing, my 80 gb I want to have to play and have fun with until someone at some website so kindly gives me an annoying problem and the whole harddrive goes to shit and i Have to reinstall windows. On this particular harddrive I would like to set it so that it erases any data I ever have stored on it "accept for the programs I install with admin rights" and basically I log off and all the data ever downloaded gets erased. my 300 gb, I don't want it to ever connect to the internet and I would like it to be protected from the 80 gb fully accept for one access point which is fully secure from anyone but me using the 80 gb and knowing where a special folder is..which i'd like to disable unless I reinable it. Any suggestions or thoughts on how I could get 2 operating systems on both harddrives and allow them to have a share point but only boot from 1 harddrive at a time...and I must say that i'm as my name goes hackernube JAVA elite. So I Do know how ot program and I have thought of ways to do this, and I Have seen it done before but i'm stumped at the moment. Oh and if possible i'd like to actually have it so both harddrives are booted at the same time it's just that i have a switch inbetween them like if i push say f5 it swaps between harddrives. Any comments or suggestions i'd highly appreciate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shaun Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 A lot of that sounds impossible or at least infeasible. You could dual boot 2 installations of whatever OS you use (presumably the one for games at least will be Windows) and only mount a single drive by default (the one the installation is on) then if you needed to copy something across you could mount the other drive, copy it and then unmount it again. As far as I know there is no way to boot two operating systems at the same time and switch between them, barring use of some virtual machine. Having everything erased except programs installed with admins rights sounds difficult to do, and I can't think of any way to do it. Why do you need to be able to do it on log off anyway? I'm not sure what it is you are asking at some points what does "Any suggestions or thoughts on how I could get 2 operating systems on both harddrives" mean? Do you mean one installtion of an operating system on each drive? I'm watching something at the moment so I won't reply to the rest of the stuff at the moment, I'm sure someone smarter than me and not watching TV will reply though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 Ummm... dude.... just sercure XP with a decent hardware firewall, and a software firewall. Get some antivirus, and some anti-malware and don't make yourself a high risk target. You'll be fine that way. Just as long as you computer is seperated from the rest of the planet by another firewall device you should be ok. Other than that I would suggest getting a second computer, and not connecting that by anything other than a KVM switch (keyboard, video & mouse). That way the actual computer is never exposed to the outside world. Or use wireless internet and dual boot with windows/linux, as linux needs effort to make wireless work. Your idea to be honest involves a hell of a lot of pointless fucking around with no gain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 away to hide the other one is to format it with something that windows doesnt understand (like a linux partition say ext3) then code your self something that can read this kind of partition under windows, use this program to access your files and to drop files onto that partition. And as for the two OS' running at the same time, you can use a vm to achieve this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shaun Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 away to hide the other one is to format it with something that windows doesnt understand (like a linux partition say ext3) then code your self something that can read this kind of partition under windows, use this program to access your files and to drop files onto that partition. And as for the two OS' running at the same time, you can use a vm to achieve this. There are already plenty of programs and filesystem drivers to access ext2 and 3 filesystems, some of which have taken years to develop, what's the point in writing another one just for this? Windows will still see the disk device itself and can still destroy the data on it regardless of whether it understands the fs. Having a NTFS partition and just not mounting it would achieve a similar thing, unless there was a very specialised virus which mounted all accessible NTFS filesystems and did something to them, which seems very unlikely and in which case it could still fuck up any partitions it didn't understand. Your idea to be honest involves a hell of a lot of pointless fucking around with no gain. Yup, this is a very strange way to go about trying to not lose data, backing up and not downloading stuff which is going to fuck your computer sounds like a better way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 windows doesnt mount or show a ext3 filesystem, it only shows partitions that are native to windows. and as for destroying the data still that will only happen if you format the drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shaun Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 It doesnt mount them, but try running diskmgmt.msc. Ordinary formatting (that is a high-level format) does not destroy data. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 i was talking about a low level format. The bottom line of it is if windows cant seem them (when you go into my computer, or in ms dos) with out the use of some other software then windows will not be able to touch any files on that disk. As for the other programs that he can download to view a ext3, im pretty sure they wont allow to lock it so you need a password to access the drives, therfor if he made his own program to view the drive he would be able to implement some security such as a password that would stop anyone that access his computer from running the program and gaining access to the drive another option would be to write your own partition table that noone else uses, that would stop people from being able to download programs to access the drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shaun Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 i was talking about a low level format. The bottom line of it is if windows cant seem them (when you go into my computer, or in ms dos) with out the use of some other software then windows will not be able to touch any files on that disk. When you go into My Computer it just shows the drives windows has assigned a drive letter to, it doesn't mean it can't see them (or "seem" them for that matter). Malicious software may not be able to read the files themselves on an ext3 partition (unless it is designed to do that), but it can still destroy the data. As for the other programs that he can download to view a ext3, im pretty sure they wont allow to lock it so you need a password to access the drives, therfor if he made his own program to view the drive he would be able to implement some security such as a password that would stop anyone that access his computer from running the program and gaining access to the drive They could just use another program to access the ext3 drive, why would they have to use his? Do you suggest he writes his own filesystem as well? He could put the program on an encrypted USB flash drive or something else like that if this was a concern and he really wanted to password protect the program. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 yes i was suggesting he could write his own file system if he was that conserned that someone else can access it. By having the drive in a partition that windows doesnt understand is the only way he can stop windows from seeing it, no matter what he does you will still be able to "destroy" the data on the drive, unless of course he only connects the drive into the computer when he wants to use it, but that isnt what he wants to do. IF the drive is connected no matter what he does you will be able to hurt the data. At least i gave him an idea of what he can do to make his data harder to see from just a normal user. But i forgot most of the people on this forum cant seem to think outside the box, they all just seem like some little 14 year old rich kid that got a computer for his birthday and see hacking on the news and thinks its cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shaun Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 yes i was suggesting he could write his own file system if he was that conserned that someone else can access it. And you thought that was a sensible suggestion for securing his system, did you? You don't think a suggestion to use encryption would be a bit simpler? By having the drive in a partition that windows doesnt understand is the only way he can stop windows from seeing it It can still see the partition, it just can't interpret the data on it. no matter what he does you will still be able to "destroy" the data on the drive, unless of course he only connects the drive into the computer when he wants to use it, but that isnt what he wants to do. IF the drive is connected no matter what he does you will be able to hurt the data. Yes, which makes writing an entire filesystem to try and protect it even more crazy. At least i gave him an idea of what he can do to make his data harder to see from just a normal user. I don't think he is trying to protect his stuff from normal users, he said: NOw heres the thing, my 80 gb I want to have to play and have fun with until someone at some website so kindly gives me an annoying problem and the whole harddrive goes to shit and i Have to reinstall windows. Which sounds like he means he's worried about malicious software which is unlikely to use a program to access another partition. But i forgot most of the people on this forum cant seem to think outside the box, they all just seem like some little 14 year old rich kid that got a computer for his birthday and see hacking on the news and thinks its cool. Are you suggesting I seem like a 14 year old rich kid? I'm not the one who doesn't understand how to use capital letters. Can you point to any posts on this thread which are similar to that a 14 year old kid might have made? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 yeh i can, just about every post here, and as for its to protect from software, then using another file system is perfect, any kind of software that is going to infect a windows machine wont be looking for a linux partition and then try to determine what that data is. Now wouldnt that mean using a ext3 partition would be a good idea, an as for encryption the data can still be destroyed, it would be easyer to destroy it. He wants to hide it so it cant be seen from windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hardwarenubejavaelite Posted June 20, 2006 Author Share Posted June 20, 2006 Thanks for all of the advice but i'm seriuosly wondering..why is it so impossible to just get a switch? I Can't just have it so that it's like i'm logged on twice? Ok lets take a look at this, so in windows it allows you to log on with two different user names. What I want to do is let my computer know that there are 2 different harddrives...and then i'd like it to boot up both harddrives at once. Let's imagine both harddrives are actually running windows xp. Except theres a catch, each harddrive has no idea the other harddrive "exists" and what I mean by this is that both harddrives hmm. Now that I think about it I guess each harddrive does has to know the other one exists if it's going to drop a file to it. So...how would i Make it that each harddrive thinks the other one is on a server? Yeah thats what I need to know, can I make an internal server inside my own computer? Can I Also make that server so that it attaches 2 harddrives to eachother. Then in the instructions set for each harddrive I want them both to think that they are the master drives of their own server. So server DRive A, and Server Drive B. Then I have a server share point on each drive. This way the drives think the other drive is on a server. So I boot up from my one drive, and then I boot up from the other drive. And well..if the duel boot is impossible then how about simply making the drives on the server system, that way I can drop files to the other drive but if one drive goes to shit then I can just reformat it/reinstall windows. I"d be willing to restart my computer everytime I wanted to boot up from the other harddrive. ANd again here we come to my original statement i'm a hardwarenube...so my remaining question is, IS their only one point that you can install a harddrive to be a master on the system or is their in fact a way to do what i'm asking by connecting/mounting each harddrive as the master? Since someone said this was impossible I think Hak5 might wanta take a look at it! Thanks everyoneeeeee!!!!!! please continue i enjoyed reading the posts! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shaun Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 yeh i can, just about every post here I would agree with you there, except the ones by hardwarenubejavaelite, VaKo and me. and as for its to protect from software, then using another file system is perfect, any kind of software that is going to infect a windows machine wont be looking for a linux partition and then try to determine what that data is. Now wouldnt that mean using a ext3 partition would be a good idea, an as for encryption the data can still be destroyed, it would be easyer to destroy it. He wants to hide it so it cant be seen from windows. In that case he wouldn't need to write his own software would he? Which was my point to begin with. I wasn't suggesting encryption as an alternative to using another file system, I was suggesting it as a possible alternative to writing your own file system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 get your self another computer, place the harddrive in that, network both computers together. Now you have two harddrives that you can use that are both running there own OS. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darren Kitchen Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 I'm having a hard time understanding the question because I think the OP is talking about potentional solutions without addressing the problem. Let's take a step back and define requirements. At a user level, what is it you want to do. I believe there is more to this than has been explained and if we can see the bigger picture we may find that the solution is much simpler than two hard drives. Are you looking to mirror your drive, run two operating systems off one set of hardware, what? And as for multiple masters on one chain, that's a simple thing to do. Connect two hard drives to one IDE chain. Set the jumpers for both as master. Wire an SPDT switch between the molexs so that you can choose which to boot. Wess could probably explain it better than I could but that's the basic idea. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hardwarenubejavaelite Posted June 20, 2006 Author Share Posted June 20, 2006 I'm having a hard time understanding the question because I think the OP is talking about potentional solutions without addressing the problem.Let's take a step back and define requirements. At a user level, what is it you want to do. I believe there is more to this than has been explained and if we can see the bigger picture we may find that the solution is much simpler than two hard drives. Are you looking to mirror your drive, run two operating systems off one set of hardware, what? And as for multiple masters on one chain, that's a simple thing to do. Connect two hard drives to one IDE chain. Set the jumpers for both as master. Wire an SPDT switch between the molexs so that you can choose which to boot. Wess could probably explain it better than I could but that's the basic idea. Thank you so much, that's the first post so far that slightly answers my question...although the other posts were very nice as well, this one is just the first one that deals with hardware. I'm going to take a moment to say "wess is uberlite!!!! I LOVE WATCHING HIS MODS!!!!" That being said, The reason I want to have to seperate O.S.'s on two seperate harddrives running off of one computer is because of all of my failed O.S.'s in the past. Lets face it, all of the anti virus's and spyware protection programs these are all here in this world because of the internet. This is going to sound extremely ironic but... There are some internet company's that me and my friends have come up with. These internet company's are all entertainment based. We have things such as editing videos and graphic design etc. I want to have 1 harddrive which I use for work, something that I can rely on saving all of my data to without having the utter fear that one day i'll catch a virus. At the same time, I love surfing the net. I love going to all kinds of websites and playing all sorts of games and watching all sorts of videos. So...a while back I was working in Century City for a company called Tech Moves. I was basically setting up computers and mounting monitors, the guy who was basically my boss was doing something very interesting on his dell. He had 2 flat screen monitors and on one monitor he had windows XP running, and on the other he had windows 2000. What was even more interesting is that he had 2 computers hooked up and if he middle clicked/mouse scroller clicked, it would swap between the computers. He had 3 modes, both side by side, 1 for both monitors, and of course the last being switching to the other 1 for both monitors. I asked him about it and he told me some confusing things and said something about having an internal server. I was literally thrilled with the idea of having 1 harddrive for internet use and the other for simply using my computer with offline based applications. This way I could download files I needed such as JDK and JREE and simply send those files to my other harddrive using a shared folder. The best part would be that if I was given a link to some website and I made some huge mistake, or I randomly caught some spyware..it would only be on my 80 gb harddrive as it would be impossible for me to connect to the internet using the 300 gb harddrive..unless of course one day I went and setup a wireless connection. It's so perfect, have one harddrive for games and the other for work. If anything ever went wrong..i wouldn't really mind reinstalling windows as I wouldn't have anything saved on the 80 gb harddrive that was important. This talk about "And as for multiple masters on one chain, that's a simple thing to do. Connect two hard drives to one IDE chain. Set the jumpers for both as master. Wire an SPDT switch between the molexs so that you can choose which to boot." i would love to hear the true answer to that one. I have a roomate who's great with hardware but professional advice from HAK5 would be greatly appreciated. If i have to settle for only being able to boot one harddrive at a time that's ok...i'm fine with restarting my computer everytime I need to switch harddrives. But having both of them up and running at the same time would be amazing!!!!! I'm just not sure how the rest of my computer would enjoy that, my CPU might go nuts and my ram might have a hiss fit. Oh and as for tech specs of my tower: 3.0 ghz pentium duo core 1 gb ram 80 gb harddrive soon to be installed 300 gb sata hard drive dvd rom drive dvd +/- RW drive Radeon 256 mb graphics card running on PCI express. and I also have a 13 in 1 media card reader yada yada yada..... But thanks so much for the advice so far. HAK5 rules!!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 This talk about "And as for multiple masters on one chain, that's a simple thing to do. Connect two hard drives to one IDE chain. Set the jumpers for both as master. Wire an SPDT switch between the molexs so that you can choose which to boot." i would love to hear the true answer to that one. I have a roomate who's great with hardware but professional advice from HAK5 would be greatly appreciated. Fairly simple, just have both hard disks set to master, then have a toggle switch that switches the power from one drive to the other. Just have to turn your machine off, and then toggle it, and power back on. The other option is something like 2 computers, with 2 monitors, and Synergy Keyboard& Mouse sharing over a lan. Then just make sure the 2nd computer has no routing to the outside world. You could also use something like VMware to run a virtual machine on your computer. Its not that fast, but it can be made very sercure. I suspect your boss did one or the other. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shaun Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 I was literally thrilled with the idea of having 1 harddrive for internet use and the other for simply using my computer with offline based applications. This way I could download files I needed such as JDK and JREE and simply send those files to my other harddrive using a shared folder. The best part would be that if I was given a link to some website and I made some huge mistake, or I randomly caught some spyware..it would only be on my 80 gb harddrive as it would be impossible for me to connect to the internet using the 300 gb harddrive..unless of course one day I went and setup a wireless connection. It's so perfect, have one harddrive for games and the other for work. If anything ever went wrong..i wouldn't really mind reinstalling windows as I wouldn't have anything saved on the 80 gb harddrive that was important. OK, that is impossible. You can't run two operating systems at the same time on the same hardware like you want. It doesn't matter if you have 2 hard drives, you need 2 of everything else as well (e.g. motherboard, CPU, RAM). There are only 2 ways to do anything like that: Have two computers or use a virtual machine for one or both of them. I'd go for the first one. EDIT: Oops, VaKo said that already, that'll teach me to go have lunch before I hit submit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 Why don't you do what the cleverer of us do when using windows? That is, use Firefox. never use internet explorer, never open email atachments and never run random executable files people send you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darren Kitchen Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 It sounds like your boss with the dual monitors running XP and 2000 was using something like synergy. http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ Television and Left monitor are connected to the black dell (Editing machine for Hak5) Right two monitors are connected to the silver custom box (gaming rig) The black keyboard and mouse next to it can cross between both. The beige keyboard and extra mouse were in that photo as I had just set it up. They're gone now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
temperseed Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 cheap solution: - use your bios... if its a good one you should have an option that allows you to choose if a HD is going to be even available to the system or not. SOHO motherboards as well as others have this opt. - If your Bios doesnt have this option simply check for an upgrade Expensive solution - Google the net... look for a cheap motherboard with a bios similar to that and ebay-it Atleast this is what i used to do a year ago when i had the same problem and it worked fine... then i realised it was unecesary. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snowy© Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/ Is what your looking for I think I read about it years ago you could (back then they said) have upto 20 seperate OS's running simultaneously These days I would of thought someone would of written something to use each core of a dual core PC seperatly Edit I'm just drooling over the HyperOs HyperDrive IV 8Gb & 16GB, ATA133 Isn't it amazing what you find when your helping other people :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shaun Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 I'm guessing that works by creating virtual machines (albeit ones that are less obvious to the user than when using VMWare or similar). I can't find much information on how it works exactly on Google though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snowy© Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 I'm guessing that works by creating virtual machines (albeit ones that are less obvious to the user than when using VMWare or similar). I can't find much information on how it works exactly on Google though. I never could either Though I think I briefly saw it reviewed in a PCPlus magazine once I'm sure it's over 4 years old (it's been going for that is) windows 98 days (I googled it PC Plus 196 , December 2002 and I recall that was atleast 1 year after i first saw it advertised) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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