Firefox Partition Question.

I have bought myself a new 250 Gig hard drive. And am going to be installing this as my primary master. It cost me a fortune and am getting paranoid about any damage occuring to it as i will be using it to store a lot of files.

So I was thinking of ways of securing it and keeping rubbish off and so forth. And i came up with a rather unique ingenious idea (i believe anyway). And that is to set up a very small separate partition on the hard drive solely for the use of Firefox in windows XP.
Therefore i could have everything for firefox on that small drive. Thus keeping the rest of the drive and the windows partition safe and also making it easier to securily wipe off all history of downloads and web sites vistited securely and easily.

But can i ask is this actually possible. And if so how would i do it?. As i believe the firefox profiles (i.e where the cache and web page history are) are automatically set into my "your profiles" folder which is hidden in the documents and settings folder. And as far as i am aware it does not give you an option while installing firefox to change the place this info goes.

So can i ask is it possible to have the entire Firefox application and all of its different things it stores while browsing the net, set into this own separate partition.

Also how big would you recommend to make this partition. Would 500mb be too small/big. (i download a lot of large files, such as MP3's and 50-100mb WMV/Mov files etc).

Im just thinking the biggest danger to my machine and likely cause of damage, plus also the biggest possible security leak by a thousand fold is my access to the internet and i figured this segregating off my firefox browser would be an inventive way to hopefully keep my system a little bit further safe.

So is it just the profiles folder and the install directory i would need to move to this partition, or is there other things Firefox has on your windows partition. I hear people mention something along the lines of a MRU or something similar. Does this come into play with firefox or is it just internet explorer and if so would i be able to put this into the patition too.

Thanks
Anthony.

 

Hi,
Firefox still installs into registry. Therefore, placing the interface files on a separate disk will not benefit you. You could say the same thing for any program that needs installation.
For safety, you could use virtual machines, sandboxing, lowered rights, and avariety of programs comes to mind. You can further beef Firefox with extensions.
The best you should do is keep private data from programs. Thus, if programs / registry get infected, your private files (docs, mp3 etc) should remain fairly intact on a separate partition.
Still, your drive could simply physically fail. I suggest you buy 2 separate hdds, that way you'll have much more redundancy.
And I also remember it is possible to use Firefox on a USB key, as a sort of portable Firefox, and use on any machine independent of the HDD. Can't recall the links right now.
Hope this helps,
Mrk

 

Hi there,
following Mrkvonic guidelines you could trial 'ShadowUser Pro 2.5' which creates a virtual volume and it is deleted automatically at every reboot, safeguarding your entire harddrive or any particular partition. At this very moment, it's also convenient to buy it as they offer a 20$ discount (original price is 69$ and it's once only).

 

I 2nd the USB key idea.