How secure is removing the drive letter from a partition?

[Wolfcastle]

I have 2 partitions on my hard drive. I want to place some data on the second partition and then remove the D: drive letter to take it out of commission on my XP or Vista OS through Disk Manager.

Since nobody can access that drive anymore, how secure is it from access?

 

[acole1]

How "secure" does it need to be?

Anyone with Admin privileges can put the drive letter back again, and a pre-OS boot CD can access it, or if you put the HD in another computer you can get to it.

But if you are just hiding your pr0n from your computer illiterate mom... I guess it would work.

 

[Wolfcastle]

I'm not worried about local keyboard users lurking around. My concern is is more of where viruses or malware replicate themselves for redundancy. Besides just giving partition a drive letter again if it could automate that process, would viruses generally ignore partitions without a drive letter, or will it find a way into the partition?

 

[degibson]

It really depends on the virus, but I would wager that data that is hard-to-access (heck, mostly invisible) would be pretty isolated from external (automated) attacks.

 

[IEC]

Considering I could just click Start Menu --> Right click My Computer --> Manage and view the partition... not very secure. Might fool automated attacks however.