Ah, I thought you might have had some sneaky exploit.

If you don't have permissions to change NTFS permissions (a bit circular I know), then no, you cannot remove it.

Win9x as you say don't have NTFS, and local drives cannot be secured in any way without a third party replacement for the file system.

Lord save us from users who are savvy enough to do a second install of W2K and fake admin UIDs to access a slaved partition [Eek!]