Can I encrypt a CD or DVD-R with a password?

Question

I've read that someone wanted to encrypt HTML for clients hoping that they'd be able to read, but not extract the information. That's not what I want. I want to password protect the whole disc so before you can do anything, you need to input a password at a prompt that pops up. I figure if it works for software manufactures when you buy their product you have to enter a key, then there must be a way to do it with a script that runs in the autorun.exe file. Any help is appreciated but if you are unsure or just don't know, don't offer to help. TIA.

Answer 1

Maybe

Answer 2

The easiest thing I can think of is to save everything into an encrypted ZIP file (which Windows XP can natively create: do File | Add Password once you've created your compressed folder). Then, if you really want, set up autorun.inf to run this compressed folder.

There are plenty free encryption products on the Web, but I can't think of a convenient way to manage with a read-only CD other than copying it somewhere first.

Answer 3

Assuming that what you're doing is legal in your part of the world, get something called truecrypt (freeware) which allows you to create a big fat encrypted file which you 'mount' as virtual disk after supplying the correct password.

Burn the truecypt exectutable, its driver and the encrypted volume onto the same dvd. Remember to create FAT volume whe truecrypt prompts you, NTFS won't work on ROM.

You should look up on-the-fly disk encryption; with most of the software I've seen that allows you to do this you need to install something first but truecrypt is the exception.

Answer 4

Not the CD or DVD itself, but you can password protect a zip file and burn the zip to the cd. Or even better, use a program like pgp to actually encrypt the files then burn them.