Password protecting Boot screen menu and hide OS disk

jimbo45 · 06 Apr 2009

Hi all
Does anyone know if it is possible to

a) change the text on the Windows 7 boot screen in a multi boot situation from "Previous Version of Windows" to "Windows XP" for instance.

b) To actually password protect the menu so that only a certain user could boot into a particular OS .

I don't really want to use a 3rd party boot manager - but of course I suppose the other philosphy is if a user is not authorised to a particular application then why show it on the menu as a possible choice.

There should be some way of getting a logon prompt at boot and depending on the users privilege level display the boot options.

Another question -- On Windows 7 the XP partition is hidden (in Windows explorer).

On XP the Windows 7 system files are "viewable" as a separate disk drive. I like the hidden partition idea much better as the OS shouldn't be aware of the other OS.

This to me seems a not very good idea to allow the possibility of "tampering" with system files - especially by a previous version of an OS.

I could almost understand it if W7 showed the XP system disk but not the other way round.

Cheers

jimbo

Brink · 06 Apr 2009

Hello Jimbo,

This tutorial below can help show you how to change the OS name in the Windows Boot Manager screen to what you like instead.

Dual Boot - Change OS Name in Windows Boot Manager

I suppose that you could set it to where there are no automatic log ons for both OSs, and just not give the user an account in the OS you do not want them on. This way even they restart the computer, they will only have access to the OS that they have a Standard account in after they log on to it.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Barman58 · 06 Apr 2009

Hi Jimbo,

For the first question this should be changeable using MSConfig or BCDedit or EasyBCD - whichever is your preference

For the second question, as the boot menu is presented before the OS knows the user I don't see how this could be possible unless you had some form of log-in via the bios. Once the user is logged on you can of course use start-up scripts as per domain based systems, and use of the policy editor to allow/deny access to system resources.

As for hiding the Windows 7 drive from XP this should be possible via the Computer Management plug-in, I say should be as I don't have a copy of XP handy at the moment to check :)

SIW2 · 06 Apr 2009

Hi Jimbo,

Change the name on the boot screen entry like this:

Open elevated cmd. Type bcdedit {enter} to get the identifier for each entry.

D:\Windows\system32>bcdedit

Windows Boot Manager etc. <snipped>

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=D:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows 7
locale en-US
<snipped>

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {0b3ceff8-9934-11dd-afd1-c77b513f5f36}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Vista x64
<snipped>

Change the description of the entry by using the appropriate identifier in the following command and whatever name you like between the quotation marks.

D:\Windows\system32>bcdedit /set {identifier} description "The new name" {enter}

Don't know if you can password protect the Boot screen. Maybe M$ figured as you can require a logon password , it isn't needed at the boot screen.

Haven't got XP, but there may the option in XP Disk Management to remove the drive letter from the 7 partition.