How to make drives invisible to XP?

[boboko]

I write disk utilities, and I'm not very good at it, so they are full of bugs, so when I test one I like to turn all but one of my hard drives off so I don't screw them up. With my old PC, all I had to do was go into the BIOS and set a drive I wanted off to "NONE," and it would be invisible to Windows.

My old PC died, and I just built a new one using a Gigabyte EP45-UDR3 motherboard. So far I'm very happy with it, but when I set a drive to "NONE" in the BIOS, it becomes invisible to boot utilities like True Image, but WinXP sees it just fine. I've even tried turning the power completely off before rebooting, but XP sees all the drives, every time.

I REALLY don't want to have to open the case and physically unplug them every time I test something. Does anyone know if the Award BIOS has some other place to make sure XP can't see a drive? Thanks.


EDIT: I got a reply from Gigabyte support. They say it can't be done without unplugging the drive. Very disappointing, considering that my old MB, which had hardly any OC settings, could do it easily.

 

[tcsenter]

In Disk Management, you can remove (unassign) the drive letter currently used by the volume, then restart.

Or, use Group Policy Editor to hide the drive in My Computer and Windows Explorer (does not restrict access).

Or, use this free utility from a company whose name appears to get edited out by the forum software for whatever reasons: EASE US Partition Manager Personal (not available for 64-bit OS)

 

[boboko]

Thanks for the reply, but I didn't make myself clear. I don't just want the drive to not show up in Explorer, which is what removing the letter in Disk Management does. I want the drive to not be detected by Windows at all, so that it doesn't show up in Disk Management. Just removing the letter doesn't do that.

 

[conlan]

Try setting it to "Disabled" instead of "None"

 

[tcsenter]

Then try option #3 to hide the drive/partition.

 

[boboko]

Originally posted by: conlan
Try setting it to "Disabled" instead of "None"

The only choices are "none" and "auto."

 

[boboko]

Originally posted by: tcsenter
Then try option #3 to hide the drive/partition.

Easeus can unhide a partition from Windows. That means the partition is accessible to Windows.

To repeat, I am working with low-level disk utilities. They work at the sector level. They don't care about partitions or file systems, and they sure as **** don't care whether the drive is visible in Explorer. I need the drive to be absolutely inaccessible, not just to Explorer, but to anything running in Windows, including Acronis, Easeus, Norton, etc.

What's weird is that setting the drive to "none" makes it inaccessible to the BIOS. For example, if it's set to "none," it won't show up in the list of possible boot devices. And yet, it shows up in Windows Explorer.

I sent a support request to Gigabyte, and got no response. It occurs to me I should probably send one to Award, since they make the BIOS. Thanks, guys, for trying to help.

 

[Absolution75]

Try setting it disabled via device manager (right click on the drive->disable). That may work.