Friday 15 November 2019

windows 7 - How to hide a partition?


I bought a small 32 GB SSD to store the operating system (Windows 7) and my applications.


I'll copy the existing boot partition (30 GB) from my harddisk (WD Velociraptor) to the SSD using GParted but I'd like to keep the existing partition intact (keeping all data on it) so I can go back to it if there is a problem with the SSD.


How can I hide the partition so it is not visible anymore to Windows? What should I change with GParted?


Second question: how can I keep the harddisk partition synced with the SSD so I have a backup? I'm looking for a near real-time solution (not something like Acronis Drive Image).



Answer



You can "hide" a partition from the boot loader by deleting its line in boot.ini.


You can hide a partition from within Windows by taking away its drive letter. Under XP you go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management, right click the partition and select Change Drive Letter and Paths. Then click Remove.


This seems a safer option than messing with the partition ID as suggested in the article that Matthew linked. Note that any method to hide it will probably render it impossible to use for backup :)


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