Disable hard disk access

[jdharap]

I am a newbie to Knoppix. What i want to do is get a knoppix distribution that can be booted up via the CD but will not see any of the local hard disks and will not
be able to read/write to the disks. What I am really trying to protect is the NTFS partition on the machine.

I am going to be operating in a sensitive environment ( a lab) where i am introducing students to Linux and other open source softwares.
Unfortunately, I have no control over the hardware and as a result cannot really unplug disks or disable disks through BIOS etc.

The only option I have is really to use Knoppix and disable hard disk access. This isnt going to stop somebody who is really bent on hacking the machines.
But the school lab guys want me to at a minimum disable hard disk access in the Knoppix CDs that we hand out.

I guess there's two ways going about this by Remastering the standard Knoppix distribution
1. Remove ntfs modules etc
2. Add root user/password so that users cannot mount the ntfs partition without root access.

Any ideas how this can be achieved? Any tips? Has anybody else already tried this?
Thanks in advance.

[Harry Kuhman]

I guess there's two ways ...
1. Remove ntfs modules etc...

Be very careful here. You had not said in your other post that you were only concerned about NTFS drive access, and removing NTFS support might indeed keep the slower students from reading or writing files on the NTFS partition while still letting you save files to flash drives or floppies. But there are still serious security issues. For just one example, just removing NTFS support would not stop a user from learning the joys of formatting disks under Knoppix!

If you have a reasonably secure Windows environment, as an alternative you might consider running Knoppix (or other Linux systems) in virtial machines under Windows. From there the students could do anything they wanted and would not expose the physical system to risk (might run faster than a CD too, an important plus if lab time is limited).