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I think we all understand how to dual boot, splitting your SSD into 2 partitions, installing the OS's and etc,etc,etc but something not so clear is the data drive.

  • In my situation I have a 500gb SSD, that will be split 250/250 for the OS and primary drives (win7/win7)
  • I will have a 1TB drive in the PC as well, and I want to make it 500/500gb for the data drives, one dedicated to each boot OS.

I want to make the drives (boot AND Data) invisible/inaccessible to the other OS. How can I do this? I only have been successful messing with the group policy, but there has got to be a better way, more proper and secure way to dual boot. Making one specific data drive partition accessible and visible only to one of the OS partitions, that is what I am trying to achieve.

For those out there that usually see fit to question the question, rather than help with the answer, I am doing this because dual booting is the only way to fully utilize ALL the hardware in my "powerful PC", unlike installing a bare-metal hypervisor or a OS based HV, which dumbs down your OS, restricting GPU and CPU power (and etc.)... (4709K/Geforce 970/16gb2133)

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  • Why are you dual booting Windows 7 with Windows 7? Also, hypervisors don't "dumb down" an OS. It's the same OS. And you control exactly how much "power" you give to each OS. You can dedicate access to cores, passthrough the GPU or other hardware. The other big advantage is that you can run multiple systems simultaneously rather than one at a time.
    – Nick2253
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 21:44
  • (Win7, I only have keys for those right now, I am going to jump strait to win10, I am not very happy with win8) So, yes, improper use of my wording, the OS is still the OS, but it will still be 'not the same/limited'. I have used Virtualbox and Vmware, and I have never seen a decent range of GPU support.. but with my GPU and its popularity, who knows, it may very well be supported.... but regardless - the overhead of the hypervisor whether baremetal or OS level is something I don't want to necessarily have. I wind up going this route regardless... running VMs certain does have its advantages
    – John Adcock
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 13:42

2 Answers 2

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If Windows can see one partition on a disk, then it can see them both. The best you can hope for is removing the drive letter from the partition you don't want access to. Any method you use is going to be "faking" things one way or another.

If you want to physically cut yourself off from the other partition so you can't even access it by accident then you'd have to use a virtual container on the physical drive. Of course the downside is now you've got 3 partitions to deal with instead of just two.

You could do something like creating two 500GB VHD files on a single 1TB drive; mounting each one to a different OS instance. Windows can mount/boot from VHD files natively so it's not even a hack.

Another option to consider; you can use encryption like Bitlocker or TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt will even let you create the containers out of unallocated space (which eliminates the three drive letters problem). The big downside to this of course is that it's no longer portable, and if you ever fall victim to corruption or you forget the password, you lose everything.

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  • Thanks for this, I have never messed around with VHDs much, and did not know you could natively boot from it. I think this is the route I will take. when I finish getting all my parts in I will give this a shot!
    – John Adcock
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 13:34
  • PS, I found a good walk through for mounting VHD drives. techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/…
    – John Adcock
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 13:37
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If you installed and partitioned everything correctly, all you have to do is:

Right click My Computer -> Manage -> Disk management -> Right click on the drive you want to be invisible -> Remove

You can also assign drive letters here. I'm not 100% sure this won't destroy your data, so be careful and try it on the data HDD first.

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