Password Protect Drive Formatting

[RyanKearsley]

As the title says, I am looking for a a way to password protect a hard drive from accidentally being formatted. This primarily relates to servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V.

 

A bit more information:

Recently there was an incident in which the data drive of a server was accidentally formatted when attempting to fix Windows Server Backup. When setting up the backup the data drive was accidentally selected and then was formatted to use for the backup on the server.

 

I am wondering if there is any way to password protect certain drives within a server from being formatted unless a password is entered first. A warning message of some sort would also be a bonus. Can this be done either using a feature within Windows or through a third party software?

 

I apologise if this has been previously covered but I couldn’t find a solution anywhere else.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[sparkeh]

AFAIK you can’t do it in that way.

 

You could use the old trick of renaming the format command in C:\Windows\System32\ so that any accidental formatting fails?

[RyanKearsley]

Okay then. That could solve the problem but feels like a messy work around. Are you able to change the command back if you do ever need it again?

[sparkeh]

Yeah just rename it back.