Suppose if you have got some important data in some drive and you do
not want to accidentally loose that data. For example, some recovery
drive that contains recovery image of your full system What you can do
is hide the drives. So the drives wont be visible in “My Computer”.
This trick will only hide the drive from being displayed.
Applications and command prompt will still have access to it and you can
still manually browse to the folder if you type in the path.
In this example, we’ll be hiding D drive in Windows 7. The steps for Windows XP/Vista are also same.
Open up regedit.exe by using the start menu search box (or type it in Run), and then browse down to the following key.
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer
If the Explorer key does not exist, you can right-click on Policies,
select New Key and name it Explorer. Create a new key by doing a right
click > New DWORD (32-bit) value and name it “NoDrives”.
This value is a 32 bit number, and the bits
are arranged in reverse order with a value of 1 hiding that particular
drive. For example, here we want to hide D: drive we would arrange it
like this:
If we convert 1000 to decimal, we get decimal value of 8 or hex
value of 8, so if you double-click on the key in the registry editor,
choose Decimal and then enter 8 into the value field.
To see the changes, just restart your computer or log off and log in again.
If you want to disable this tweak, simply remove the NoDrives registry key.
Here’s a list of the values you’ll have to enter for a few different drive letters.
If you want to hide any other drive or a
combination of drives you can figure out the correct binary code and
convert that into decimal or hex value. (Hint: Use calculator in
scientific mode for binary to decimal/hex conversion.)
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