Patent ID: 7539828

Claim:
A method in a computer system for automatically protecting data stored in a portion of a storage device having a designated protected space, the computer system having a designated unprotected space and a redirected space, comprising: loading a software redirection driver into an input/output driver hierarchy loaded in a volatile memory of the computer system during power-up initialization, wherein the software redirection driver is an input/output driver; and under control of code of the loaded software redirection driver, redirecting input/output requests by: intercepting from requesting code that is external to the loaded software redirection driver a request to modify a location in the protected space or a location in the unprotected space; when the request is to modify a location in the unprotected space, initiating modification of the location in the unprotected space without redirection; when the request is to modify a location in the protected space, determining a location in the redirected space that is associated with the location in the protected space; and redirecting the intercepted request to modify the determined location in the redirected space instead of the location in the protected space; in response to a request to shutdown the computer system, disregarding the data in the redirected space; after the disregarding of the data in the redirected space, intercepting from requesting code a request to read the location in the protected space; and in response to the intercepting of the request to read the location in the protected space, providing data from the location in the protected space instead of providing data from the redirected space, so that the data stored in the location in the protected space automatically remains unaltered when the computer system is restarted from a powered-down state.