A way to have different boot drives in one system that have no access to each other?

[nine9s]

Is there any way to accomplish the following:

During the football season, I watch bootleg video feeds of games not in my area. I am concerned about a higher risk of getting maleware etc. from doing this. I am going to build a new system with a SSD as my primary and boot drive and a hard drive for data etc. What I want to do is have a 2nd hard drive that is bootable and has a O/S on it (and I will use it to watch the games.) I then want a way where I could boot to it and the system on it not see nor have access to the SSD or other hard drive (be like a separate computer basically.) And when I use my SSD and other hard drive, that system would have no access to the other hard drive.

Any way to accomplish this?

For example, any sata connection switch that would physically do this (stop physical connection to the SSD/Hardrive 1, while allowing connection to the hard drive 2, and vice versus from a manual switch before botting perhaps) or are there sittings in the BIOS where I could turn off/stop access to each system drives before O/S start?

 

[vailr]

There'd be very little chance of "drive-by"infecting of a non-booted secondary hard drive.
I would suggest simply using the F11 key during boot sequence to select the secondary boot drive. Use 3 free programs: one of several free anti-virus programs, "SuperAntispyware" & "PeerBlock" while viewing your quasi-legal TV program.
After finished watching the sports program, re-boot to your "default" hard drive, and then run an anti-malware/virus/rootkit scan on the secondary hard drive.

 

[Eeqmcsq]

That's an interesting request. I did a quick google search, and maybe something like this:

How to hide hard drives in Windows XP/Vista/7

 

[krnmastersgt]

If your computer is strong enough or the video feeds consume very little in terms of resources you could also just use something like VirtualBox and create a virtual machine on your PC. The VM doesn't know of anything outside its private environment unless you link it to your actual machine, that way there's no chance of infecting anything, and if something is infected then you can just wipe the drive clean and start over as it's purely virtual.

 

[greenhawk]

a virtual PC as mentioned above using one of the many around (inc a free one from MS called "Virtual PC") can do what you want. It loads and runs on your computer, but behaves like a computer on your network.

Other option is having a drive bay to swap out the HDD's as you need to, but just for watching TV that seems a little over kill. There use to be devices that allowed you to swap a drive with a key switch but that I have not seen since the IDE days, besides it would not work if you have multiple drives.

 

[ericloewe]

Depending on how you're watching the videos, a bootable CD (Ubuntu, for instance) would be easier, cheaper, and 99.9% malware-proof even if it has access to the drives. There may even be an option to not mount the hard drives in your system

 

[mfenn]

Depending on how you're watching the videos, a bootable CD (Ubuntu, for instance) would be easier, cheaper, and 99.9% malware-proof even if it has access to the drives. There may even be an option to not mount the hard drives in your system

:thumbsup: to this idea. It should work fine if you are watching the games through a browser.

 

[corkyg]

...Other option is having a drive bay to swap out the HDD's as you need to, but just for watching TV that seems a little over kill. There use to be devices that allowed you to swap a drive with a key switch but that I have not seen since the IDE days, besides it would not work if you have multiple drives.

The Vantec EZ_Swap 3 systems can handle as many as you have space and ports for. These are all SATA drives.

Vantec's EZ-Swap 4 is possibly better. It is trayless, and can accommodate any number of SATA boot drives one at a time.

 

[piasabird]

This is impossible to completely do because the BIOS has access to everything sooner or later. However, you can use a 3 way switch and just select which drive you want to send power to.