How to protect one hard drive from another

[Este Nuno]

So I have a laptop with Win 7 and an SSD hard drive that is going to be used for work and potentially keeping a wallet on. I have bought an another hard drive that fits in the slot where the dvd would normally be. I have bought and installed Win 8 on this one and I want to use this other hard drive for fun and not worry about malware. I would like to have it so that when I am booted in to the hd with Win 8 it has no way to access the SSD with Win 7, basically I want it to be completely safe incase I get a virus on the Win 8 drive.

So does anyone know how to go about this? I tried messing with windows permissions, but that turned out to be a mess and doesn't look very promising. It seems like this would be as simple as password protecting the SSD or something but it's not and it's fully accessible and my wallet and work documents are right there.

Any help, guidance or recommendations is greatly appreciated. 

[DeathAndTaxes]

There is no way to hide a drive from the OS.   One option would be to create a truecrypt partition (encrypted "drive") on the SSD drive and simply never decrypt it except when you are booted into the OS you like.  Since the decryption key won't ever be used/stored/left in temp files/in memory/etc on the "win8" partition won't  be able to decrypt the truecrypt partition.

Baring user error (like accidentally decrypt the secure partition from the "causal OS") there is nothing that can be done.  Any malware can see the drive, see the encrypted partition but lacking the decrypt key can't do anything about it.

[Jutarul]

So I have a laptop with Win 7 and an SSD hard drive that is going to be used for work and potentially keeping a wallet on. I have bought an another hard drive that fits in the slot where the dvd would normally be. I have bought and installed Win 8 on this one and I want to use this other hard drive for fun and not worry about malware. I would like to have it so that when I am booted in to the hd with Win 8 it has no way to access the SSD with Win 7, basically I want it to be completely safe incase I get a virus on the Win 8 drive.

So does anyone know how to go about this? I tried messing with windows permissions, but that turned out to be a mess and doesn't look very promising. It seems like this would be as simple as password protecting the SSD or something but it's not and it's fully accessible and my wallet and work documents are right there.

Any help, guidance or recommendations is greatly appreciated. 

look into bios settings. Maybe you can deactivate the corresponding controller.

[OpenYourEyes]

As D&T said, truecrypt it probably your best option.

Another could be formatting the one drive with a Linux file system (ext3/4): Windows can't natively access Linux file systems unless you install a 3rd party driver, so only install the driver on the drive with the wallet. Probably not 100% fool proof as a virus could ship with the drivers, but I've never heard of one.

[Este Nuno]

There is no way to hide a drive from the OS.   One option would be to create a truecrypt partition (encrypted "drive") on the SSD drive and simply never decrypt it except when you are booted into the OS you like.  Since the decryption key won't ever be used/stored/left in temp files/in memory/etc on the "win8" partition won't  be able to decrypt the truecrypt partition.

Baring user error (like accidentally decrypt the secure partition from the "causal OS") there is nothing that can be done.  Any malware can see the drive, see the encrypted partition but lacking the decrypt key can't do anything about it.

I figured this might be the only way. Only reason I haven't tried this option yet is I don't have any experience with TrueCrypt or encrypting drives in general. I just don't want to screw anything up and have to format/reinstall/reconfigure everything on the laptop and deal with the potential downtime from work.

Is it as simple as booting in to the encrypted drive prompts me for my key, which then decrypts the drive and loads Win 7 and runs as normal? And when I boot in to the Win 8 drive I just have an encrypted volume visible? That would be good.

[Este Nuno]

look into bios settings. Maybe you can deactivate the corresponding controller.

I looked around and couldn't find anyway to disable the SSD unfortunately. If it wasn't a laptop I could just physically detach the drive or something, but I don't think I can do that with this.

[Este Nuno]

As D&T said, truecrypt it probably your best option.

Another could be formatting the one drive with a Linux file system (ext3/4): Windows can't natively access Linux file systems unless you install a 3rd party driver, so only install the driver on the drive with the wallet. Probably not 100% fool proof as a virus could ship with the drivers, but I've never heard of one.

This would be a good option but I need to be actively using Windows only programs on both hard drives when I'm on them. I wish I could just dual boot Ubuntu or something and do all my work on Linux but it's not an option for me yet unfortunately.

[Gatorhex]

You can buy a HDD removable DVD drive caddy tray and physically pull it out.  

[Este Nuno]

You can buy a HDD removable DVD drive caddy tray and physically pull it out. 

That's what I bought, but I need to use the internal SSD for database stuff(much faster) for work so the internal drive needs to be protected from the removable one.