Password Protecting Partitions on an External Hard Drive

Question

I'm looking forward to the suggestions I get back on this one.

Here's the rundown: I'd like to have an external hard drive to use as a backup for my household. Ideally I'd like to be able to take this hard drive to other places (extended family) to share pictures, videos and things like that. At the same time, I'd like to use it as a backup for work documents too - these things need some level of protection (they would be legal documents, things that need to be kept private, etc.)

My ideal solution is to partition the hard drive and have on partition be password protected. Is that possible?

If not, what else would work?

To recap, here's the features I need:

• Portable Hard Drive
• Usable in any Windows machine without installing software on the computer (maybe even connectable to a PS3 or XBOX)
• Part of the drive is accessible to everyone
• The other part is only accessible to me

Answer 1

Your best bet is probably TrueCrypt, a full-featured encryption program. Put your 'public' files directly onto the hard drive, and then put a TrueCrypt volume onto the drive. TrueCrypt doesn't require any installation, so you can include a copy of the software and run it on any Windows computer; I don't know about other platforms, but I'd assume that similar no-installation copies are available for other platforms.