Hiding Logical Drives in Windows XP

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.