Windows Dual Boot - Safety

[Lindley]

Hi,

Have created a dual boot Windows system with W11 and W10, both Home versions.

We want to keep the W10 safe and private while using W11 for normal use/surfing etc.

Seaching the web seems you cannot Lock out the W10 system using Veracrypt etc, but its suggested that in W11 you go into Disk Management and remove the Drive letter of the W10 system so W11 cannot see the drive, simple enough, but too simple ?

However noticed that there are Advanced features where you can Deny access, as in the pic below, which seem to be make it more difficult for anyone to remotely undo , assuming this is a safe thing to do ?

Or is there a better way to hide the W10 partition ?

[coromonadalix]

For this case, you use some "booting software" who can hide partitions once the main selected OS as booted,  it will prevent you from messing the other(s) partition(s)

In some case you could add a second drive who will never get hidden, you could use it to store and transfert things between your OS'ES

The main problem  is  : if your working not hidden partition crashes,  you may have some problems to recover the other partition(s)    it will depend how the multiboot is made and the mbr sectors  etc ...


The simplest thing for me is to get some hdd hot swap enclosures, i have some with power switches, that way i only powerup the os i need, and have the transfert / storage hdd always powered up

I now switch between ZORIN OS and Win10 and or Win11,    gotten tired to set multiboot sectors / boot drives  .... sometimes an OS tries to get in control and fucked up the other ...  and i use VMware or Virtualbox  for the oldies like W95, w98   yes i still need theses

Oh  by the way
Win 10 need  i think 4 partitions on the drive to work,  not sure if windows 11 is still 4 of 5, this is a normal behaviour of windows

[Ed.Kloonk]

https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-virtual-machine/

[Ranayna]

Normally, as long as both drives use NTFS, you should not be immediately able to access the files on the "foreign" drive.
You might be able to access files that have read permissions set for "Everyone", but you should not be able to access the foreign Users folder.

But you can always overwrite the permissions. If you are admin on the system that is currently running, you can always get access to all files on all attached drives.
Any malware on your system that manages to achieve admin privileges can wreck the files on any attached drive.
Not even encryption helps. The malware will just double encrypt the files.

Only disconnecting the unused drive is *really* safe in a dual-boot environment.