Hide Drives from Your Computer
January 12, 2008
There are so many drives in My Computer. It can be very difficult to find certain things you are not positive of their location amongst them all. Certain ones that you never access, perhaps a USB Flash drive that you are using solely for ReadyBoost, a network drives that is only used for one piece of software of a floppy drive, you may want to hide to make things tidier.
Even better, this tip only hides the drive from being displayed. You can still access it through applications and the command prompt and manually browse the folder if you type in the path.
For this example we will use the floppy drive.
Configure the Hidden Drives:
1.In the Start menu search box, open up “regedit.exe”.
2.Browse down to this key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
(If you cannot find this key, then you can right-click on “Policies” and choose New Key, then name it “Explorer”.)
For the next step, it is unlikely the NoDrives key already exists by default. Instead you will have to create it following:
- Right-click.
- Choose new 32-bit DWORD.
- Name it “NoDrives”.
32-bit is the value of a 32 bit number. The bits are arranged in REVERSE order. Value of 1 equals that drive being hidden.
So for our example to hide drives through from A: to F: they would be arranged like this:
After converting 10001 to decimal we are left with a decimal value of 33 or a hex value of 0×21. So now you must:
3. Double-click on the key in the registry editor
4. Select “Decimal”
5. Enter “33” into the Value data field.
To see the changes you have made, you must restart explorer.exe. Do this from Task Manager or simply log off and back on again.
Uninstall Tweak
To REVERSE the tweak, removes the NoDrives registry key.
Reference Info
This table shows a number of values you can enter for different drive letters.
To hide multiple amounts of drives, use the table of ALL the drive letters so that you can figure out the correct binary code and then CONVERT that into decimal or hex.
Our result! The floppy drive has been removed.
This tip is also valid to use in Windows XP.
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