Total lockdown on write access?

Would it be possible to keep Windows from writing to any files on the drive, (essentially restricting it to read-only access, to the hdd), even during startup?

Returnil etc. can't, to my knowledge, prevent the OS from altering system files etc. before they are loaded.

 

Use shadow defender.

 

That seems to be much like Returnil, at least from googling it.

If you have also tried Returnil, what are the differences?

I guess the only was would be to run the os in a vm. Like for example one could use a very lightweight linux running virtualbox or vmware, and then run your windows from there. The Linux sitting in the background would do very little to interfere. But, especially games are often very hard to play properly through a vm if they are very gpu intensive.

=/

I could of course, have my "game os" as the main os, and then launch my netbanking etc. from vm's within it. Since, who cares if a game gets infected/corrupted etc.

 

Wat is ur method of changing system files b4 being loaded.

 

That would probably be a hassle yes, but could be done by disabling the lock at "dos level" or something, and then allowing it to update.

 

I wonder why would you want to do such thing. Anyway, there are pen drives with write-protection switch. You can try this method, which involves heavy tweaking of Windows OS and renders it almost unusable.

How would that disable writes on the guest OS?

"dos level" is in no way different than "windows" one. If you are concerned with unwanted changes to the system, use one of the virtualization solutions as already suggested.