How do disable a HD (backup)?

[rharbin]

What is the easiest way to do this? I'm not worried about PC theft, fire,
etc. I just want to have a second HD that I can use save an image of the
drive I recently did a reinstall on. Can the drive containing the backup
simply be disabled in the bios? I'd prefer not be taking the cover off the
box to disconnect, reconnect, cables to the drives. Thanks, Ron

 

[Woody419]

The NickLock would certainly work. It is the only manual hdd switch I know about.
Tiger Direct has it on sale for $19.99.

 

[tornadobox]

maybe you should burn an image on CD-R (it'll span several CD's most likely), and then you wouldn't have to deal with a 2nd hard drive at all (since you wouldn't use it for anything but an image of your current drive).

 

[SUOrangeman]

Disabling drives in BIOS will NOT work for WinNT4/2k/XP. Those OSes are (not?) smart enough to not look at the BIOS to see what drives are out there.

-SUO

 

[zzzz]

You can use a removable HD tray and just use the key to cut the power off.

 

[Superwormy]

Def. go with a removable HD tray and rack. They cost like 15 bucks if you look on Pricewatch.

The ViPower ones are nice.

 

[RalfHutter]

zzzz - Is it safe to just turn the power off to a drive (IDE Primary Slave in this case) while it's in Windows? Will data get corrupted? Physical problems due to power off/on? Any potential downside?

I've never heard of doing it this way with an IDEdrive.