Operating Systems and Software

Re: GPT vs. Windows 7. How to make Windows 7 ignore a drive?

rrplay — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:54:44 GMT

3vi1:

Thx rrplay - I guess my Win skillz must be getting quite rusty for me not to think of such an obvious solution. Disabling the drive in Device Mangler worked fine.

Appreciate the assist!

Just a note that should be mentioned

there is a difference in disabling the drive for Current User and system admin

disabling the drive in Device Manager with full Admin privileges will revoke the drive;s access to all users.

Re: GPT vs. Windows 7. How to make Windows 7 ignore a drive?

3vi1 — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:56:31 GMT

Thx rrplay - I guess my Win skillz must be getting quite rusty for me not to think of such an obvious solution. Disabling the drive in Device Mangler worked fine.

Appreciate the assist!

Re: GPT vs. Windows 7. How to make Windows 7 ignore a drive?

realneil — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:21:58 GMT

Windows automatically see's and mounts a drive that it thinks is new. Automatic actions need to be changed.

Navigate to: Control Panel,.....All Control Panel Items,......then to "AutoPlay".

Once you're there, uncheck the "use Autoplay for all media devices" box and try it out.

Re: GPT vs. Windows 7. How to make Windows 7 ignore a drive?

rrplay — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:18:39 GMT

You can try to disable the drive from the Device Manager.in Win 7

No need to uninstall the driver, no need to hack the registry,

its simple & may be what you are looking for.

lots more aditional info here for other solutions

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/hide-drives-from-your-computer-in-windows-vista/

GPT vs. Windows 7. How to make Windows 7 ignore a drive?

3vi1 — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:17:33 GMT

I have a very large USB3 drive that I use with my Linux system. It is using a GPT partition table, because it contains a 4TB Btrfs partition.

Here's the problem: If I dual-boot my system over to Windows, it immediately pops up a dialog saying "Drive I: must be formatted before use." and then sets focus on the "Format now" button. The dialog popped up a half dozen times when I was trying to use the file manager to troubleshoot a different NTFS drive issue yesterday (which I eventually fixed by rebooting back to Linux and running the ntfsfix command). It's annoying, and it scares the hell out of me that I might accidentally be hitting enter when that window pops up (hopefully there's some confirmation prompt after that button).

I think Win7 is supposed to support GPT, but it probably doesn't have any idea that the Btrfs partition is valid (and way better than NTFS). So, here's my question: Anyone know a registry hack or simple tweak where I could make Win7 ignore this drive entirely?

It's not a major problem, as I stay booted into Linux without rebooting for months on end - but I'd really like to avoid any chance that Win7 might torch my network backups on the one blue moon I start it.