Password Protect Partitions

There's no such utility available and you can't have 2 instalations of win9x in the same machine.
I recommends you Norton Ghost to accomplish your task.
You need a c: boot drive with enough space and a d: drive to hold the compress images files ofboths instalations.

Ghost trail (www.ghost.com) allows you to perform a disk image to a file and restore it using a boot disk.
Depending on how big is the c: partition, the time to have a fresh copy of the os., say 8 minutes for a 3GB data parttion.
hope it helps!!

Ypu may be able to accomplish this with a boot manager.
They are normally used to boot to different operating systems. But I don't see why you couldn't set it up to boot to different installations of the same operating system on different drives.
The trick will be hiding the drives / partitions from each other.

Another way to accomplish your end goal would be with 2 hard drives, and a lockable hot swap tray, or mobile rack. I have seen them for under $15 in a couple of different places.
This tray would go in a 5 1/4" drive bay, and you would physically swap drives between classes. If needed, you could lock up the other drive in a storage cabinet.

in the old dos days there was a program pctools (from norton) with it you could have locked folders. Security administrator (fee)does something similar and much more. A other option is to dual boot between win98 (play/install) and w2k (for work).
Or you could dual boot also between the 2 win 98's on different parttions and use security administrator. You can also use microsoft's tweakui (free to hide the drives from certain users from see it, making changes in the registry , desktop etc.

Look at the one's thats best for you.

Leopold

Again,
Neither the boot software won't allows you to hide the partition or other operating system from strange fingers, nor the windows98 itselft, that's why I recommends you Norton Ghost!.
Yes of course you can upload/download S.O. images from cdrom, and it's an outstanding solutions too!!!

Have a great christmas night !!

Normally I dont like to buy into arguments but edt's solution is the best.

Norton Ghost (although more expensive) can also enable a partition to be hidden. You'd have a c: (for the OS) and a d: partition. d: would normally be hidden.

On d: you'd keep the two images you need.

You'd script up two versions of install scripts probably on two floppies which would, when booted...

1 Unhide the d: partition
2 Restore the appropriate image
3 Hide the d: partition again

All in about 10mins.

Furthermore if you needed to change the configuration of either image, you could restore, change the configuration and rebuild the image to the d: partition.

In a training environment you're constantly refreshing the OS because students always manage to destroy it (either accidently or maliciously!) and its more efficient than trying to uninstall stuff after they've finished anyway.

Most places I've seen use this kind of setup to manage their training environments.

Cheers,
Tim (Fully expecting to be rejected "out of hand"... :-)

Just a couple of comments on your reply...

"i am the technician for the school i do not wish to show the Professor if they wish to even know how to unhide and restore partitions"

The restoration of environments would be completely automated off the floppies. Instructions would be. Insert floppy. Turn on computer. Not too hard!

"if they want to install a new program you would have to save that image once again on say 16 computers restore it on to a image on D then when the next Class comes to plan have the other image restore to the computer."

Yep. This method does not allow you to save your installed programs between refreshes - except by building a new image. If you wanted to keep them permanently then that wouldn't be a problem. No more work than your current idea, anyway.

I'd suggest a slight modification... Three images on the D drive. Two "clean base images" and one "dirty" one. ...and another scripted floppy to create it...

"don't really have to worry about therefreshing of the OS if i save the registry file then have it scrited to restore each time that i restart the computer"

This is wishful thinking, I'm afraid. There are LOTS more things that can go wrong with the OS than the registry being corrupted.

That method leaves the installed programs/files themselves intact on the filesystem and that is guaranteed to cause you grief when you come to re-installing the software in the next class.

Lastly your idea of using Windows 2000 is a very good one. More expensive though. Win2K has far better security built in and you'd be able to protect the system much better. It wont stop malicious damage, though. Where there's a will, there's a way...

Hope these thoughts help.

Merry Christmas,Tim.