Is It Safe to Unmount Disk 1 Debian Linux From Disk 0 Windows 7

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QUESTION :

Background:

  • I have an Asus P67 Sabertooth motherboard. The motherboard supports 6GB SATA.
  • I have two 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black 64MB Cache SATA Drives.
  • I have a Plextor PX-880SA CD/DVD Optical SATA.

Both hard drives are on the 6GB Channels.

I DO NOT dual boot … I simply use the uEFI BIOS quick key to access drive selection on POST to determine which drive ~ OS I want to use. In Linux, I have disabled OS prober in Grub … so if I run update-grub it won’t try to wipe out my Windows MBR on disk 0.

Disk 0 is Windows 7.
Disk 1 is my Debian 6.

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  1. Disk 0: Online

    Vol C = Sys Reserved for W7 = 100MB NTFS
    Vol C = W7 (C:) = 244GB NTFS
    Vol D = Data (D:) = 342 GB NTFS
    346GB = Unallocated

  2. Disk 1: Online

    (/boot / /etc /home) = 500GB
    346GB = Unallocated

  3. CD-ROM 0 :

    DVD (E:)

==================================================================================

When I start Windows 7 I can see Disk 1 as ‘Active’ which … concerns me … I don’t want Windows to have any access to this disk. I want to Disk 0 and Disk 1 completely separate.

Is it safe to unmount my Linux drive from Windows 7 using diskpart? Is this even necessary to achieve my goal?

ANSWER :

Windows defaults to mounting every disk that it can; as on disk1 it can not find any partitions that it can read you can safely remove it. However, there should be no problems with windows “accessing” the disk.