trickydicky said:
can i allow others to read and play music files on a external hardrive but
not copy or move them
If it's a USB hard drive then you may find you are limited to using
FAT/FAT32 filesystem which doens't have any permissions settable. If you are
sharing the drive over a network then as Bob said you can set permissions on
the share element rather than the filesystem itself. You can't stop people
copying stuff that they can read though, as Viktor said, but you could stop
them being moved, in that they can't be deleted from the source if you deny
write permissions or set only read permissions on the file/folder.
I'm not sure if the restriction of only being able to use FAT/FAT32 on USB
hard drives also applies to other external interfaces such as eSATA, I would
think not. It probably applies to ieee1394/firewire drives though. I seem to
remember you can still format as NTFS though via either a registry tweak or
using alternate tools for the formatting...
To add further complication to the filesystem permissions issue, Home
edition of XP (so perhaps Vista too?) does not allow you to see the Security
tab for editing NTFS permissions anyway..
