Hiding and showing HDD partitians

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#1

Hello.
I haven’t had Suse on my machine for a long time and am about to create a dual boot system. Suse 11.1 will be sharing XP Pro SP3. It’s on an Acer Netbook 160GB / 2GB

I have a partition which contains personal secrets and must remain hidden from prying eyes. I’ve been using Windows command prompt and the dishpart function to remove and assign said partition. (Mount/Unmount). The partition is effectively hidden from Windows and doesn’t appear anywhere and can’t be searched.

Yes I know it can easily be found by those who are more technical-oriented but it’s effectively hidden from those individuals who are nosey.

I’ve “messed” with Suse quite a few times before, each for a relatively short time getting a little use to the GUI yet still consider myself a novice. I’ve done a few things in Suse console before but am not extremely familiar or comfortable in it.

So I’d like to install 11.1 again for a dual boot.
I’ve freed up 15 gigs of unallocated disk space for Suse. I am planning to have that secret partition assigned and volume made active during Suse install. I’m not sure how Suse install handles unassigned NTFS HDD volumes- whether it’s removed or not.

How can I hide and show partitions once Suse is installed?

#2

Use
fdisk -l
(e.g. from an live CD or a install CD in repair mode) and you see the partitions. AFAIK there is no hiding possibility in the partition table. Thus this hiding must be an MS windows trick. I know of no trick to let fdisk not show a partition.

#3

Alternatively, why don’t you go for something that’s really secure and lets you access the partition from both Windows and Linux? You could use the program TrueCrypt to create a hidden, encrypted partition, formatted with a filesystem of your choice, that no one can read unless they know the passphrase.

Or just go for a regular encrypted partition, that, while visible, is unreadable to anyone without the passphrase.

For more info, please see here: TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux

I have been using TrueCrypt myself for quite a while and it works like a charm.