Restricting access to a folder on an external Windows drive

[akadmon]

I have an external hard drive hooked to my Mac Pro that I actually use as a data drive when I'm boot camped in Win XP. The drive and all the folders are read only in OSX, which is fine (I don't have a need to write to it from OSX). However, there are some folders I would like other people using this computer (OK, kids and wife ) not to be able to access. Even though I've set these folders as hidden in Win XP (as well as password protected with Folder Lock), they are all visible on the OS X side. Is there a way to set access privileges for these folders in OS X? I'd hate to have to lock the drive in my safe every time I step away from the Mac Pro

 

[ddekker]

locking

hmmmm.. this is a hard one.... only thing I can think of right off the cuff is to RAR the directory with a password on the rar'd file (i think rar can do that)

DD

 

[RadarLove]

Assuming that (a) you have XP Professional, (b) the Windows file system is NTFS, and (3) you are the only one with the login privileges for the account, you can use EFS (encrypting file system) to keep your file/folder private. Here's a good link:

http://www.iopus.com/guides/efs.htm

BTW, I just installed XP Media Center Edition on my MacBook, and it also looks like it has EFS.

 

[akadmon]

Assuming that (a) you have XP Professional, (b) the Windows file system is NTFS, and (3) you are the only one with the login privileges for the account, you can use EFS (encrypting file system) to keep your file/folder private. Here's a good link:

http://www.iopus.com/guides/efs.htm

BTW, I just installed XP Media Center Edition on my MacBook, and it also looks like it has EFS.

I have Win XP Home on the Mac Pro, i.e., no support of encryption. I'm running W2K Pro on my laptop which allows me to encrypt the folder, but that doesn't really do me much good since I would have to hook up the external drive to my laptop every time I want to access the encrypted folder. I'd like to leave the drive hooked up to the Mac Pro all the time.

Perhaps with the final version of Boot Camp Apple will make OSX recognize Windows file attributes such as hidden and locked.

 

[pianoman]

would hiding them in a password-protected (encrypted) sparse/disk image work?

 

[Westside guy]

Perhaps with the final version of Boot Camp Apple will make OSX recognize Windows file attributes such as hidden and locked.

I imagine not - the open source NTFS projects don't currently handle the ownership bits.

However TrueCrypt might be of some help.