Hide Drives In Windows XP and Vista

Recently I received a comment from one of the reader asking how can he hide some specific drives on his computer hard disk so that no one can access that drive or partition.

It means like you want to hide specific partitions on your hard disk like C, D or E etc. This trick of hiding your drive is really useful when you have some private files on a particular drive which you don’t want others to see. 

You can hide any of your drive in three different ways including you can easily hide your drives by using a free software called TweakUI, applying a registry hack to to hide drives and with simple commands through command prompt.

Let’s discuss all these three above mentioned methods to hide drives in windows

Method 1: ( Easy Way )

Hide Drives Using TweakUI ( For XP )

This method involves using free software called TweakUI from Microsoft which lets you hide drives in windows XP the easy way.

1. Download TweakUI from here and Install it

2. Run TweakUI and Navigate to My Computer –> Drives

3. Uncheck the drive which you want to hide and Click Apply button at the bottom right.

4. That’s it you will not see the hidden drive under my computer after clicking apply.

Method 2: ( Geeky Way )

Hide Drives With Registry Hack ( For Win XP and Vista)

1. Open Start Menu >> Run, and type regedit and press Enter key

2. Navigate to Following path

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer

3. Look for the Key NoDrives in the right pane, if it does not exist create a it otherwise skip step 3.1 to 3.2

3.1 Right click in the empty area in the right pane and select new 32-bit DWORD

 

3.2 Name it NoDrives

4. Double click the key Named NoDrives and set the value to hide the specific drive, For Example to hide the E: Drive

First select the Radio Button which says Decimal and enter 16 for hiding the E: Drive

   

Tip: In order to hide any other drive other than E: Drive use the following values map

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: 67108863

Note: You may need to restart windows in order the registry setting to come into effect and drive gets hidden.

Method 3: ( Geeky Way )

Hide Drives Via Command Prompt ( For XP and Vista )

1. Open Start Menu >> Run and Type diskpart and press Enter key

2. A Dos Window will open up, type list volume and press Enter key

3. Type remove letter E and press Enter key ( To Hide E: Drive )

Note: It may require reboot sometimes and don’t worry about your data your data will remain same and unaltered

4. To unhide E: Drive Type assign letter E and press Enter key

Repeat the same procedure if you want to hide any other drive like C, D etc. This method also lets you hide more than one drive as compared to the Method 2: -Involves Registry Hack which lets you hide only one drive at a time.