Hide and Hide From

I've read here about the importance of hiding different OS's from each other. I did a search on "hide from" in the DD Manual and came up empty. I read all the hits for "hide" and I see how to hide and unhide. But it seems that if I have two OSs on different partitions I can hide one or the other. And the manual indicates that I won't be able to boot to the hidden one. So what does it mean to hide them from each other and how do I do it with DD?

Dave

 

Dave,

Hiding a partition doesn't really make it hidden. It just changes it enough so that Windows doesn't assign it a drive letter or recognize it as a valid partition. This is necessary if you want some OS isolation or are using "duplicates" of an OS.

If you want to do it manually with DD, then, for example, if you have two XP installs (XP1 and XP2), you would do the following:

To boot XP1: Set XP1 Active and Hide XP2
To boot XP2: Set XP2 Active and Hide XP1

If you have three, say Vista, XP1 and XP2, then it would be:

To boot XP1: Set XP1 Active and Hide XP2 and Vista
To boot XP2: Set XP2 Active and Hide XP1 and Vista
To boot Vista: Set Vista Active and Hide XP1 and XP2

Basically, the booting partition should be Active and Unhidden and the other OS partitions should be hidden. Note that this really only applies to Windows. Linux doesn't have a problem with other OS partitions being visible.

Most third-party boot mangers will take care of hiding and unhiding as necessary for each OS that's setup.