Windows XP - Thursday, July 10, 2008 20:42 - 1 Comment

Hide drives in XP – My Computer

Hide drive letters or shares in My Computer
There are 2 reasons why you would want to hide the drive letters in my computer the first being security, you might want to limit the viewing of specific drives to the public or users.  The second reason (and a strange one) is the multiple mappings of shared drives, we though it was random but found out it was happening when hyperlinking within excel to a file on a mapped drive (in this situation we had a user with 3 drives plus the system drive so we would disable viewing all other drives on the system).

To hide drives Follow these steps:
1. Launch the Registry Editor: start –> run –> regedt32.exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft Windows > Current Version > Policies > Explorer
3. Right-click the Servers key and select New –> DWORD value.
4. Name the value NoDrives
5. Press enter twice to open the Edit DWORD Value dialog box.
6. Using the list below, type a number that corresponds to the drive you want to hide in the Value Data text box, and click OK.
7. Close the Registry Editor.
8. Restart your computer to make these take effect

Number that corresponds to Letter:
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

Example:
To hide other drive letters that we didn’t list put in the number to the DWORD Value . drive F: would have a value of 32.

To hide multiple drives, add the values together. For example, to hide drives B: and C:, use a value of 3. If you want to hide all drive letters, use a value of 67108864.

QUICK TIP: if you want to hide all but 3 drives jsut use the highest number of 67108864 and subtract the drive letters you want to see, so if you want to see drive C,G,A it would be 67108864 – 4 – 64 – 1 = 67108795

Note: Read our terms and conditions before editing your registry, we do not recommed it and take no responsability if you break your own computer.

Article written by MyComputerAid.com