How to make drive not accessible to guest account?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike McCollister
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M

Mike McCollister

I have an external drive on my vista machine that has gives "Users" full
control. I just found out that the guest account is part of the "Users"
group. Is there a group that does not include the guest account? Basically I
don't want to have my backup drive accessible to the guest account. Is that
possible without replacing "Users" with each individual account?

Thanks,

Mike
 
Mike said:
I forgot to mention that I am running Windows Home Premium.

Thanks,

Mike
Click to expand...

The Guest account is normally disabled. Apparently for some unknown reason
you've enabled yours. Disable it and the problem goes away. If you want to
have an individual account for visitors, make one (Standard user account)
and called it something clever like "Visitors". To protect yourself in case
of account corruption, you should be working from a Standard user account
for your daily stuff anyway with at least one extra Administrative user
account set up for emergencies. Then if you want to log in and go directly
to the Desktop (into one particular user's account) for convenience, you
can do this. The instructions at this link work for both XP and Vista:

Configure Windows to Automatically Login (MVP Ramesh) -
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Autologon.htm

All that aside, if you want to keep the contents on your external hard drive
private, consider encrypting it with something like TrueCrypt (free).

Malke
 
Mike said:
What is wrong with using the Guest account?
Click to expand...

The Guest account is not for when you are feeling hospitable. It is a system
account used only to temporarily allow someone without an account on the
system to log on and do some work.

From TechNet
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb418978(TechNet.10).aspx

"The Guest account is intended for users who require temporary access to the
system. However, if this account is enabled, a security risk may exist
because an unauthorized user could gain anonymous access to the system
through this account."

That's why it is normally disabled in Windows, Unix, OS X, and Linux.

Malke
 
Malke,

How is this less secure than just creating a standard user account?

Mike
 
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