Concerning hiding the system partition that's not being used!

jeline

New Member
Hello,

I'm a new user of EasyBCD. I'm using Windows XP Pro and Windows 8 Pro. I was able to
set up a duel boot with these two systems and seems to be working fine. However,
I noticed that whatever system I choose to use the other systems partition is
still showing in "My Computer"!

Is it possible to have let's say Windows 8 partition hidden while I'm using Windows
XP and visa-verse? I didn't see anything pertaining to this in the User Manual!

Is it possible to do this with EasyBCD?

Thanks for your time and help!

Sincerely,

John Eline
 
Start | Run | compmgmt.msc

Go to disk management and you can unassign a drive letter from there.
 
Microsoft boot managers have never supported dynamic use of the hide bit.
If you value your ability to use system restore or backup shadow copies, you should not let XP see any newer OS.
Use this hack to protect yourself.
System Restore Points - Stop XP Dual Boot Delete
It does no harm to let later OSs see each other or see XP, but if you want to prevent them from being accidentally accessed, you can simply remove the disk letter of the other OS in Disk Management.
A partition without a letter will not be displayed (and cannot therefore be accessed) in Explorer.
 
Hey, Terry, do you have any idea if the SR bug persists with XP/8 dual-booting? I guess we have no reason to believe they'd do anything about it and I should know better than to even hope.......
 
It's XP which sees the new shadow-copy format of the system restore folders as corrupt, and "fixes" them back to XP format (destroying all the contents in the process).
No way they've gone back and altered XP, so W8 will be just as vulnerable as Vista and W7.
They could have chosen to use a different name for the restore folder with any of Vista/7/8, but they're still sticking with using the exact same name despite the clash of formats.
 
Last edited:
BootIt allows to hide unused at the moment partitions. It needs to be clarified above, if its possible to boot later from a volume without a drive letter.

Generally it would be nice to have such option in EasyBCD to auto hide by changing the relevant PBR bits to "hidden" all bootable volumes except the one selected at boot time. Usually these volumes remain unused after boot, except when one needs to defrag them more efficiently after booting from another OS.
 
Last edited:
BootIt is a third party boot manager
EasyBCD is not.
EasyBCD takes no part in the booting of the system; that's all done by MS bootmgr.
See post #3
No MS boot manager has ever manipulated the MBR Partition Table "hide" bit.
If you use any app to turn that bit on, then bootmgr will never be able to boot it again till something else turns it back off.
If you want a boot manager that does have that ability, you can get it for free with grub4dos or you can pay for any number of others like BootIt.
EasyBCD is an app for managing bootmgr's BCD. If you use it, you're stuck with bootmgr's restrictions.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top