ard, et al:

morganlefay gave the right command. It is really very simple. Without adequate security in the file system, the hard drive is wide open. With FAT32, unless you specifically deny access to the hard drive with some third party tool (firewall), your drive is wide open.

I estimate the life expectancy of any system (Win98, NT, Win2k, ...) running a FAT boot partition to be about 30 seconds. I may be optimistic.

Much as I have harrassed my co-workers about this, they didn't get it until one of our high profile boxes got owned. The reason? Set up with FAT32. OS? Didn't matter.

We have a tool called DeathDisk. This is what we use when systems misbehave.

The only thing worse is the fool down the hall who decides to share out his C: drive to the universe because he wants his girlfriend across town to copy a file from his hard drive.