Windows XP forum: Password Protect External Hard Drive & Internal Hard Drives?

How to Password Protect External Hard Drive & Internal Hard Drives?

I was hoping to do this with Windows XP Pro service pack 1 and I am only able to creat compressed Password Zipped folders...

Questions:

Does compressing or encrypting risk corrupting the data? Is their some way to verify it is an exact copy( especially large video files?) Isn't this Zipped password very easy to crack? Is it common to take numerous hours to Encrypt 100 GB's of data?

How do I put a Password on an External Hard disk so I can access it from any XP Pro computer without loading additional software?

I'm talking about 150+ Gb of plus data, including large video
files, .tiff photos, Quicken back-ups, and documents.
I keep all my data backed on an external hard drive in my car trunk in case house burns down, but fear what may happen if the data gets in the wrong hands.


I have been searching for several hours with no luck...
the closest free program I have found is : Zero Footprint Crypt 4.03.01 but am not sure how good it is.

Also I have 8 hard drives on 1 computer and I can not figure out how to only allow the administrator to access them. I know I can hide the My Computer icon on the Guest accout but I am still able to put the drive letter( E: ) in the adress bar of IE and bring it up, as well as search and bring up all info from the Guest account. Ideally I would prefer to restrict the Guest account to JUST Their "Documents" folder. Is their some way to do this?



I would Value some input on personal preferences for easy password protection of large files(10+ GB)

Thanks for any help friends