Hide Your Drives

[Matt]

Ever wish you could make one of your computer's drives invisible to anyone snooping around on your system? Whether you have sensitive docs, pictures, or any other private data, this is one of the easiest ways to keep them safe. Keep in mind that you'll still be able to access your hidden drives; you just won't see that they exist in Windows Explorer or the My Computer folder.

Before proceeding, it is highly reccomended that you backup the registry!

You'll thank yourself for saving your existing settings if anything goes wrong, so be safe rather than sorry.

Steps:

1. Open Regedit.

2. Navigate to this string:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

3. In the Explorer key folder, create a new DWORD value by right-clicking Explorer, then choosing New DWORD value. Name the value "NoDrives" (without the quotes). This value defines local and network drive visibility for each logical drive on the computer. All drives will be visible as long as this value's data is set to 0.

4. Following the table below, enter the decimal number corresponding to the drive(s) you want to hide as NoDrives value data. When you right-click on NoDrives and choose Modify, make sure you select Decimal base, not Hexadecimal.

Drive/Number to Hide

A: 1

B: 2

C: 4

D: 8

E: 16

F: 32

G: 64

H: 128

I: 256

J: 512

K: 1024

L: 2048

M: 4096

N: 8192

O: 16384

P: 32768

Q: 65536

R: 131072

S: 262144

T: 524288

U: 1048576

V: 2097152

W: 4194304

X: 8388608

Y: 16777216

Z: 33554432

All drives 67108863

If you want to hide more than one drive, you simply add the drive amounts together for a combined total.

For example, to hide the D:/ and T:/ drives, add the decimal value for the D:/ drive to the decimal value to the T:/ drive.

8 (D) + 524288 (T) = 524296

To disable all of your visible drives, set the value to 67108863.

You must reboot your PC to see your changes. Have fun hiding!

Source

Matt

[irregularjoe]

Interesting!

How do you view them after they are hidden?

[Matt]

It is designed to only hide the visibility of the drives. If you go into Explorer and type in a file location or D:\ for example (assuming D is hidden) you will be able to access the drive/files.

Matt

[Falcon1986]

There is also a similar tweak in TweakUI that does the same thing and does not require going into the registry. Just add a check mark to the drives that you want to display and remove the check marks from the ones that you don't want to display. Hit 'OK' and changes take effect immediately.