Can I disable Drive in Dual Boot ?

[malam]

I have Windows Vista and XP installed in a dual boot system. The two are installed in two different Drives. My kids use the XP mostly and I would like to disable the Vista Drive when running Xp so that I don't get any messing up with the drive. Will this cause problems when I try to boot to Vista ?
Thanks.

 

[tmike]

you will not be able to dismount the drive that the bootloader is on. (you CAN do this the other way around, making the XP partition unavailable while using Vista, but obviously that won't help with what you want).

An alternative might be to set add a permission entry denying access to users associated with the other OS (say, a deny entry for the 'Users' and 'Administrators' groups of the other OS; the 'backup operators' group would be able to work around this, and admins could if they wanted to probably; but to prevent accidents, it will probably work fine)

 

[pysyrian]

If you wanna take that route (as I did)
just go into your Windows-Control Panel-System-Hardware-Device Manager and go to the opposing harddrive and disable it.

After a quick system restart.....voila! no more harddrive in your way through each OS respectively!

EDIT---You could also just open my computer, right click the opposing drive and select properties, click the hardware tab, find the opposing drive in the list of disk drives (you'll need to know the location it's configured for out of your physical setup) and select it, now click properties, under the general tab you should see a drop down tab that's titled device usage, simply select disable----EDIT

WARNING! I'm pretty sure this WILL NOT work with one physical harddrive divided into multiple partitions. I have two physical harddrives with an OS installed on each. I haven't tried it with just one harddrive, so do so at your own risk!!!