At 05:09 PM 7/8/96 +0000, you wrote:

On 8 Jul 96 at 14:12, Ray Arachelian wrote: [..]

...

I'm constantly switching between NT and 95 and have them installed on the same drive. Would be cool to have some low level driver to encryption from the Master Boot Record for example to get around unfriendly OS's- but then NT won't respect the BIOS calls, 95 in 32 bit mode won't, Linux sure as hell wont, etc.... that was the whole idea of having a BIOS in the first place, but woe is us.

BIOS was written for real mode... part of the problem. Another is the not-made-here syndrome, and in a sense Linux, OS/2, NT and 95 are different types of operating systems, so a shared BIOS is unfeasible.

It would be nice to develop an encrypted filesystem that could be ported across operating systems for those of us with multiple OS's.

BTW, Linux 2.0 is making a nice step in that direction by adding support for mounting a file (which contains a filesystem), specifically to allow encrypted file systems as well as things like testing out iso9660-fs before buring CD-ROMs, etc. In theory something similar can be done with Win95/NT and OS/2, but it hasn't been done the proper way (SecureDevice is really a hack in that sense).

One of these days Microsoft will officially release NT's IFS SDK. A few "preliminary" and incomplete copies of a 1993 beta release do float around but for a mere $50K there's a company that will sell you the complete source for an IFS. It's a crime that Microsoft hasn't shipped this SDK yet as the Installable File System is one of the great powers of NT. So, if someone is interested in coughing up the $50K I know a couple NT programmers just chomping at the bit to build cool IFS's like PGPDrive, etc. --j