Ext3 users - Jul 2009 - Making an ext3 partition unmountable (intentionally)

Hello,
?
I?d like to make an ext3 partition that cannot be mounted easily on another
system.? I don?t want to use loop-aes to encrypt the partition because of the
performance hit.? I also don?t need it to be very secure, I just need to prevent
someone from taking the drive from my system and reading the data off of it.
?
I was thinking about one or a combination of one of options:
?
	1. Changing the partition?s ext3 magic number to some other magic number that
only I recognize
	2. Changing the location of the super-block and backup super blocks
?
Obviously, I?ll need to recompile my e2fsprogs to handle this, but I don?t think
that?ll be an issue.? Does anyone see a problem with any of these?


      
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Sri S wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I?d like to make an ext3 partition that cannot be mounted easily on 
> another system. I don?t want to use loop-aes to encrypt the partition 
> because of the performance hit. I also don?t need it to be very 
> secure, I just need to prevent someone from taking the drive from my 
> system and reading the data off of it.
>
> I was thinking about one or a combination of one of options:
>
>    1. Changing the partition?s ext3 magic number to some other magic
>       number that only I recognize
>    2. Changing the location of the super-block and backup super blocks
>
Maybe you could simply use a loop-device with the "offset" option.
It would be trivial to mount the partition (one would just have to issue 
the correct options to mount and/or losetup), but recognizing the 
beginning of the filesystem and guessing the correct offset would 
require some (minimal) knowledge about EXT3 layout.


HTH,