Hiding files and folders

[Tdrgabi]

Greetings,
is there any way to hide as much as posible a file or folder in win98 or higher. Changin the file atribute to hidden wont do. Writting to fat is extremly dangerous and windows treats this as empty spaces and overwrites them.
I dont need the code ... just the idea ...

if i start word and office is hidden i want the windows to throw an error like "\Office\ does not exist" .
Thanks for the time wasted reading this, and the second wasted thinking on this.

 

[cpjust]

Use NTFS and set the file/folder security to nothing for the users who you don't want to have access to it. You could also enable encryption to make it more secure.

 

[Tdrgabi]

i know that ntfs has this option but i have to write it for '98. And no encryption will be alowed. can i scan somehow the fat and change the location of the directory? .... to something that doesnt exist?

 

[Salem]

Maybe this?

http://www.scramdisk.clara.net/

> can i scan somehow the fat and change the location of the directory?
Sure, you could create orphaned sectors which are neither part of the file system nor part of the free sectors either.

This is after all what scandisk finds and turns into scandisk.nnn files.
It also means anyone running scandisk on your disk of hidden information will destroy your attempt at hiding information.

I suppose with a bit of research you could "lose" a directory into this no-mans-land and recover it again.

But as you said originally, "Writting to fat is extremly dangerous".

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[cpjust]

What about marking a certain part of the disk as bad sectors, then put your data in there. You'd need to remember where you put your data, but that shouldn't be too hard.

 

[Tdrgabi]

Thanks for your efforts, the bad sectors idea sounds interesting, will that make my files inaccesable? and any ideas how can i mark a part of the disk as bad?

 

[cpjust]

I don't know of any C/C++ functions that let you do it, but since ScanDisk does it, it must be possible. Maybe you need to use Assembly?
If you do it this way, your files will not be part of the file system, so the only way to read/write to them it by knowing their disk address and size... Sort of create a file system of your own inside the bad sectors. If you're not careful though, you could corrupt some or all of your FAT filesystem.
Sounds like a nightmare to me. Why on earth would you need to completely hide your files like this, and why can't you use encryption?

 

[Salem]

Of course if you resort to using a whole disk partition to store all the information, you can effectively hide it quite simply by flipping a bit in the boot sector of the partition.

Of course anyone who actually knows a thing or two about partitions will figure it out sooner or later.

Depends what you are intending to hide, and who you are intending to hide it from.


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[ArkM]

Windows 98 is an absolutely open (home use, i.e. unsafe) system by definition. You can't protect Win 98 disk files at all (except hard cryptographics, special chips, lots of additional equipments etc).
Don't reach a deadlock...

 

[Tdrgabi]

Thanks again for your interest, i think i will drop the project into the recycle bin. It was a project i could take, and my boss specified that he wants a software for hiding or maybe denying acces(in any way, but preferable hiding) of folders & files. And it should be fast for big things too.

Encryption will kinda die on big files & folders ...
The bad clusters thingy sounds the solution but i dont have the smallest idea how to do it ... and how to do it safe, i dont want my fat crushed .....


Anyway, thanks.