Ways of HDD password protection

Both Cryptic Disk and Disk Password Protection can be used to enable hard drive protection; the only question is what type of protection best meets the user needs. Let’s see which ways of HDD password protection both of the programs provide.
First of all, it is important to distinguish between system and non-system partitions of an HDD.

If an HDD does not have any operating system partitions, one can easily protect it with any of the two solutions: Partition Protection suggested by the Disk Password Protection program or encryption with the Cryptic Disk program. The major difference between the solutions is that Disk Password Protection is intended to serve as a password protection tool without data encryption, whilst Cryptic Disk can ensure both (to learn more on the differences, go to What do I need to choose: Cryptic Disk or Disk Password Protection? What is the difference? What will better serve my needs?).

As for the HDD with a system partition, Disk Password Protection can provide a complete HDD password protection through the combination of the program’s features: Boot Protection and Partition Protection. To password protect such an HDD, it is usually sufficient to just protect non-system partitions where sensitive data are stored because one normally does not keep any files other than system ones on the system disk partition. With Partition Protection enabled, none of the partitions of the hard drive (except for the system one) will be visible for any operating systems. For the system partition one can use Boot Protection if necessary.

To password protect an HDD with a system partition with the help of Cryptic Disk, one needs to encrypt its non-system partitions. After encryption, the disk partitions will be password protected. This measure will serve as an adequate protection of the HDD even if it’s accessed from another computer or subject to any data retrieval actions. The system partition of the HDD cannot and should not be encrypted with Cryptic Disk (to learn more on that, go to Why cannot the system partition be encrypted?), since this may lead to the operating system failure in case of the system disk damage or a lost password. HDD encryption is strongly recommended if the disk contains commercially sensitive or confidential information that can be of particular interest to third parties or, for example, exposure of which might have an adverse effect in terms of commercial or national security.