Monday 24 October 2011

How To Hide Drives In My Computer



Hi Subhash here, Let me thanks Atish once again to present you guys with another “Registry Trick“. In this tutorial we will see how you can hide a particular Drive or multiple drives from Windows Explorer (my Computer).
Are you one of them who always tries to hide things in your computer? Like hiding a folder, hiding a file or looking for tips to set permissions so that  someone (may be your friend or family members ) cannot see it ? Here is a good news for you. Using this trick you can hide drives in My Computer.
Let me go a bit more  detailed as to  what I mean. If you have like 3 drives in your computer, Let’s say C: D: and E:, using this registry trick you can hide one or more of your drives. Now you can keep all your private stuff in a separate drive and be confident, Now one will  see it until you want. Let it be school, collage or your home.
Here is the step by step instructions with screenshots to help you accomplish this.
1.       Open Registry Editor .
a.       If you are on windows XP, Go to start->Run and type “regedit” press
enter.
b.      Windows 7 users, Can type “regedit” in start menu search box.
Description: Opening Registry Editor from Run BOX2.
Navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Description: How to hide drives in my computer
3. Right click on the white space in right side and select new=>Dword Value  (as shown in below screenshot).
Description: How to hide drives in my computer tutorial
4.       Put the name of the Value as “NoDrives” (Without quotes)
Description: no drives registry value
5. Now we have to put some data in this value so windows explorer will not display the specified drives. There values has to be in HEX, but most of the us are not comfortable in HEX so here is the Decimal values for the drives .
  • To hide A:  1,
  • To hide B :  2,
  • To hide C :  4,
  • To hide D : 8,
  • To hide E : 16,
  • To hide F : 32,
  • To hide G : 64
  • To hide H : 128
By this time you know how this algorithm works, You can calculate the values yourself for a particular number (Hint hint hint : Test your Mathematics)
If you want to hide more than one drive, just sum up the values. Like to hide E and F, the value data would be “16+32″ = 48
6. Decide which volume/drive you want to hide from above example and then put it as the value data in for the value name “NoData”. For example, I
am going to hide drive E: so the value will be 16.
Description: Assigning NO drives value data
7.  That’s All you have to do. Now restart your computer so the changes can take effect. Next time when you login, you will not see the drive you just hide. To get it back, Simply delete the registry key , log off and relogin.
For curios guys who wants to know how it works, Explorer.exe (which is your Shell) , reads this registry key to get the settings and restrictions if any assigned to that particular user. The Hkey_Current_User key is for the current logged in user only. If this change is made to ”HKLM(HkeyLocalMachine) settings will be applied to all users on the
computer.
Disclaimer  : The above changes required making changes in Windows Registry. Do not mess with the keys you do not know about. It can cause your system to become unstable. If something goes wrong, Do not panic and try to undo what you have or ask for help with detailed information about what sort of
problem you are encountering

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