How to Hide Drives in Window XP

I have already written a posts on How to hide floppy drive in your computer in my earlier posts.

Another trick is to hide computer drives in window XP. So this tips is very useful for home users, particularly for those who wants to hide/secure their important data from other users. You can hide any specific local drive or all drives(physical and removable) of the system and network drives also. By disabling the display of drives, you can safe your personal data from non-technical users on a single computer. The drive will not show up in My Computer, will not be accessible in command prompt , and won’t even show up in safe mode.

Follow the given steps to change the system drives registry value.

Note:- To use this feature, you will need to be logged into your computer with administrative rights.

1. Click Start button and type regedit in Run Option then press Enter.

2. Now Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

If Explorer doesn’t exist then right click on Policies and select the key and name it Explorer.

Right-click on Explorer and then choose New and then DWORD Value.

Name the new value NoDrives and then double click on it to open its properties dialog box. click on Decimal for the Base Unit.

For specific drive use values (For example, for A, B, C, D, E, F, H drives, the values are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 respectively)

In this case we are trying to hide E drive, so we modify the value data box to 16.

The really cool thing about this trick is the fact that you can hide multiple drives by adding the numbers of the particular drives together. For example, if you want to hide drive E and drive G, you would type in number 80, which is 16+64.

Now if you want to hide all the system drives then modify value data to 3FFFFFF.

Now close the registry editor and restart your computer after a changes to go into effect.

When you want to get your drives back, change the value of NoDrives to 0 or simply delete the value altogether or delete the DWORD item.

Again close the registry editor and restart your computer after any changes to go into effect.

Note:- This trick also work in Home Vista.

Enjoy the tricks!!!

Tagged as: hide drives, hide hard drives, hide hdd, hide local drives, How to computer drives in Window XP, invisible drives, invisible hard drives