Ever wanted to hide a specific drive on your computer? Hiding it from My Computer, Windows Explorer, Map N/W Drive and also using Run or DIR commands ?

Using the tweak that I would be specifying, you can hide any drive by all means hence keeping your private data, private and hidden for everyone

Using Regedit, “To launch regedit, Type “regedit” in Run and press Enter.

Navigate to the follwoing location in the Registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

and

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

In both these locations, create a new  DWORD named  NoViewOnDrive

This DWORD uses a 32 bit mask to define local and network drive access for each logical drive on your computer, out of which the lower 26 bits correspond to drive letters A to Z.  The drives are visible when set to o and hidden when set to 1.

Few examples of the value corresponding to various drives are;

A=1, B=2, C=4, D=8, E=16, F=32 …..

Note each drive has the value double of its previous drive…. this way you can calculate the value for the drive you want to hide upto Z.

If you want to hide two drives, A and D then ad their respective values ie. 1+8 =9 should be assignedto NoViewOnDrive DWORD.  This will hide both the drives once you restart the computer. To hide all the drives assign the value 67108863 , which is the summition of all the values corresponding from A to Z. This has ben tried on Windows XP … I am not sure about Vista or Windows 2000.

The booting process has changed significantly with Windows Vista . Instead of using the traditional BOOT.INI to boot through an ARC path as in earlier Windows NT-based OS, Windows Vista boots to a boot manager. This boot manager allows for a more extensible and platform independent boot environment and also maintains backward compatibility for previous operating systems. The boot environment is referred to as the Boot Configuration Database (BCD).

Boot Configuration Database

The Boot Configuration Database (BCD) is a configuration and storage mechanism for describing boot applications and related settings. Conceptually, the store is an abstracted, portable and firmware independent replacement for the traditional BOOT.INI.

Boot Process in Windows Vista

BCD consists of three major components: stores, elements, and objects. Broadly, a store is a collection of objects, and an object is a collection of elements. The figure bellow shows a conceptual example of a system BCD store.

The boot process in Windows Vista now works as follows:

1. User powers on the system.
2. MBR is located on the system drive.
3. Boot Sector is located… then BOOTMGR is loaded and BOOTMGR looks for an active partition on sector 0 of the drive.
4. BOOTMGR reads the BCD file and gathers Information about operating systems installed on the machine and then displays a boot menu (if necessary).
5. If a Vista is chosen, BOOTMGR transfers control to WINLOAD.EXE and in the case of a resume operation, WINRESUME.EXE will be called.
6. If a down-level operating system( Win XP, Win 2k, etc. ) is chosen, BOOTMGR transfers control to NTLDR also called the down-level loader.
7. WINLOAD.EXE initializes memory and loads drivers set to start at boot, and then transfers control to the kernel.