Is there an easy way to enable/disable internal drives in XP?

[Kaido]

I was thinking up a backup scheme involving a primary hard drive and two backup hard drives in Windows XP, all internal. My concern is that if you do get a virus or something similar and it eats your primary drive and your backup drives, then you lose all of your data. Is there an easy way to disable and reenable internal drives within XP? That way you could do alternating backups but not have the internal drives suspectible to viruses.

 

[bacillus]

if you use acronis true image then you can make what acronis describes as a safe zone where you can keep your backups.

 

[spyordie007]

How about an external (USB) enclosure? It's very easy to take on/off and you can be certain it's unaccessable.

Or if you need a software option I suppose if you really wanted to you could mount/unmount it as needed...

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: spyordie007
How about an external (USB) enclosure? It's very easy to take on/off and you can be certain it's unaccessable.

Or if you need a software option I suppose if you really wanted to you could mount/unmount it as needed...

Internal 10Krpm drives, don't want to go USB with them 😀

 

[nweaver]

the problem is that if you can easily mount/unmount them, so can virii. Not sure if the look for hdd's that are not mounted, but it would suprise me if they didn't

 

[sourceninja]

after installing my nforce drivers I get a safely remove drive C option in my start bar.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: nweaver
the problem is that if you can easily mount/unmount them, so can virii. Not sure if the look for hdd's that are not mounted, but it would suprise me if they didn't

True, ideally you want something that is physically disconnected and in order to have that you need hardware that supports it. That's why I suggested an external USB enclosure.

Hot swappable SCSI would work well also, but that's not a likely option on a desktop 😉

Internal 10Krpm drives, don't want to go USB with them

Why waste a good drive on backups? Why not get an inexpensive and slower drive if it's going to be offline the majority of the time anyways?

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: spyordie007

Originally posted by: nweaver
the problem is that if you can easily mount/unmount them, so can virii. Not sure if the look for hdd's that are not mounted, but it would suprise me if they didn't

True, ideally you want something that is physically disconnected and in order to have that you need hardware that supports it. That's why I suggested an external USB enclosure.

Hot swappable SCSI would work well also, but that's not a likely option on a desktop 😉

Internal 10Krpm drives, don't want to go USB with them

Why waste a good drive on backups? Why not get an inexpensive and slower drive if it's going to be offline the majority of the time anyways?

Because the main drive with be a 16gb ramdisk in raid 0 😀

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Kaido
Because the main drive with be a 16gb ramdisk in raid 0 😀

If you've got that kind of ridiculous money to burn, just buy a ~300GB 7200RPM drive and put it in an external caddy. Problem solved.

Any software-based mechanism for 'disabling' drives is going to be theoretically susceptible to malicious software (or just general OS corruption, a bad drive controller, etc. etc.)

 

[Smilin]

Forgive me if this is stupid 😛 I only skimmed the thread.


Devcon is the command line version of device manager and may come in handy.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Kaido
Because the main drive with be a 16gb ramdisk in raid 0 😀

If you've got that kind of ridiculous money to burn, just buy a ~300GB 7200RPM drive and put it in an external caddy. Problem solved.

Any software-based mechanism for 'disabling' drives is going to be theoretically susceptible to malicious software (or just general OS corruption, a bad drive controller, etc. etc.)

Well, it will be for my workstation, and the price isn't too bad compared to a SCSI disk (about $1,500 total for the ramdisk). I'm trying to figure out a good backup scheme for the ramdisk. One of my ideas involves using two 36gb Raptors and doing a nightly clone of the ramdisk and alternating which disk the backup is made to. However, if I get a virus, then it can still eat those backup drives. If I go USB or Firewire, the backup will be a lot slower, but I will get the ability to turn the backup drive on and off. Any good ideas would be appreciated 🙂

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Forgive me if this is stupid 😛 I only skimmed the thread.


Devcon is the command line version of device manager and may come in handy.

Never heard of that app before, so thanks 🙂 BTW, cool A/V test in your sig!

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Kaido
Well, it will be for my workstation, and the price isn't too bad compared to a SCSI disk (about $1,500 total for the ramdisk).

16GB for $1500? Uh... is it me, or is that still about 15-20x the $/GB of a recent 15KRPM SCSI drive? You can get latest-gen 146GB drives for maybe $700 each (about $5/GB), and older ones for less. 10KRPM Raptor 150GB SATA drives (nearly as good for single-user work) are only $300 ($2/GB). 16GB for $1500 is more like $90-100/GB.

Admittedly, there are situations where a sizable RAMDisk could make a big performance difference, but I'm not sure a lot of single-user workloads are in there.

I'm trying to figure out a good backup scheme for the ramdisk. One of my ideas involves using two 36gb Raptors and doing a nightly clone of the ramdisk and alternating which disk the backup is made to. However, if I get a virus, then it can still eat those backup drives. If I go USB or Firewire, the backup will be a lot slower, but I will get the ability to turn the backup drive on and off. Any good ideas would be appreciated 🙂

I would not rely entirely on 'internal' backups.

Besides the possibility of software/user error or OS failure or a virus corrupting your data, a system-wide hardware failure (like your PSU blowing up, or your disk controller going bad, or even a real 'disaster' like a fire or flood) could easily wreck all your internal drives at once.