Touch ID on a desktop

[Overenthusiastic]

Hello world, I am new here.

Although I have been following for over 4 years now, I have never been in the forums. 

 

The reason I joined today is because I have an idea which I honestly don't know if it's sensible or if it had been implemented somewhere.

Please correct me if I am wrong anywhere. 

 

The theory is to have 2 different accounts on a single desktop with 2 hard drives, working independently to each other.

(It started looking a bit dumb once I started writing it down...)

 

We have an option of creating multiple accounts on a single PC, and the users can share files between them. But the data or applications installed by one user causes the system to slow down or potentially lose data for the other user too.(assuming the first user has installed some adware or something along those lines by mistake)

 

My theory is that when there are 2 hard drives in the system, and if we can make them run independently, we can potentially create a scenario where one hard disk can assigned to one user and other to the second user. 

So in theory, the data(or the virus) on the first hard drive won't have any effect on the performance on the second hard drive, and therefore the user experience for the second user. 

 

The idea I have is if somehow we can integrate a finger print scanner into the system(popping out somewhere on the case- easy to access), and have it connected to the both the hard disks with a coded PCB as a bridge(which somehow detects the finger print and powers up the hard drive which is assigned to that user and keeping the second hard drive powered off). This should keep both the hard drives safe from the data of the other hard drive. 

 

I am very sorry if all of the above sounds like some crap. But it's just an idea popped into my head. And I don't know anything about coding and stuff, but I am just interested in tech. 

 

So if this sounds dumb, just ignore the post, or if you guys think it may work, someone tag Linus or one of the boys here. 

 

Thank you. 

[Murasaki]

PCB bridge? Overengineering in a nutshell. What I'd do is get a simple USB fingerprint scanner, install an operating system to each HDD and you just dual boot. You can disable the second HDD for each operating system respecitively so they can't communicate in any way.

[unsungheroist]

if its windows 10 you can even Face ID login with webcam

[Bitter]

The issue is getting finger print ID to work at boot before the disk is chosen, sans Windows running yet. I suppose you could have a 3rd small drive to boot windows, read the finger print scanner, run a script based on the finger print scan result that would then shut the system down and reboot with the correct hard drive, but the script would need to be able to modify bios boot order. I think just having two different PC's might be a more secure solution, maybe use a KVM switch to pick between machines with a single kb/mouse/monitor.

[corrado33]

You could do it easier. Have a restricted access account that gets logged into automatically and asks for a fingerprint. Once a fingerprint is detected, start up a virtual machine associated with that fingerprint.

 

Alternatively.... use a mac and turn filevault on.

 

(Macs have touch ID... and filevault will prevent any cross contamination of viruses.)

[Bitter]

VM is a great idea! If there's the hardware for it.