How to password protect an external hard drive without encrypting it?
I carry my external hard drive around with me sometimes, and was wondering if there was a way to password protect the entire drive, with no hassles or anything, just a simple password protection...if possible this solution should prevent someone from trying to format the drive...thanks!
note: should be compatible with Windows XP/Vista/7, not worried about Mac.
EDIT: I want a solution that does NOT involve encrypting the drive, I'm too leery of encryption, at least just yet...
Solution 1:
The only way I can see to make this possible is to use the password protection mechanisms of Parallel ATA (aka IDE). The PATA spec allows setting a hard drive password:
hard drive passwords and security
The disk lock is a built-in security feature in the disk. It is part of the ATA specification, and thus not specific to any brand or device.
( http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Attachment#HDD_passwords_and_security )
If the disk is password-protected, you need the password to unlock it before it can be accessed.
However I would rather advise against this: This feature of ATA is seldom used, and you need special software on the host computer to use it (which in turn normally needs admin privileges to install on the host computer). Also I'm not sure it will work with removable drives, and I believe Serial ATA does not have it. Finally, it can be defeated using special software (or hardware tinkering) on most drives (though this can be tricky).
Other than that, I don't believe there is a solution to your problem. If you want to prevent others from reading or manipulating the data, encryption (specifically full disk encryption / FDE) is the way to go, e.g. TrueCrypt. This is reasonably cross-platform, usable and secure. It will however not prevent someone from formatting the drive.
As to protection from formatting:
If you want to prevent people from destroying the data on the drive, you need to keep it physically secured anyway. If someone just wants to destroy the data, they can just damage the drive...
Solution 2:
I think the BitLocker tool of Windows 7 is the most reliable tool to protect an external or removal drive. Though it will encrypt your drive but nothing to worry about the BitLocker encryption, you can trust on it. I found a tutorial @ http://techstrick.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-password-protect-usb-drive-in.html where they describe about using BitLocker to password protect USB drive but this tutorial is also applicable for other drives, like external hard drive, internal hard disk drive etc.