Hide a drive from My Computer

When your computer is used by multiple people either on a single user account or with multiple different accounts, it can sometimes be useful to have the ability to hide one or more of the drives (local partition or network drive) from My Computer. This means that the drive is hidden, but it doesn’t mean that it is inaccessible. If you wanted to hide the C: for example, then it is still possible to access this drive by pressing Start, run and typing C: into the field and pressing OK.

It is possible to hide a drive from either the computer and/or specific users, so its up to you to decide what s best for your situation.

To hide a drive on the computer:

In the event that you want to hide the drive from everyone, no matter what account they are using they will not be able to see the drive. Not even the local Administrator will have this right.
Before starting, you will need to be sure that you have the rights needed to be able to edit the registry.

Here is how you can hide a drive from all users:

Click Start, Run and type regedit. Click on the OK button to open the Windows Registry.

Go to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
\policies\Explorer

Add a new DWORD value called NoDrives and give this a decimal value that corresponds to (x) drive(s) that you want hidden. See the table below to help decide what value you will need to input into this field.

The changes will take effect the next time you reboot your computer.

To hide drives from a user:

In this case the drives will be hidden from a user of your choice.

First of all, here is a quick presentation of the two user methods of a computer using an NT family operating system:

• Method 1: a single user profile is used by all people on the computer, with a common username and password being shared (simple user mode).
• Method 2: Each user has their own logon account (username and password) on the computer (multi-user mode).

In method 1, the drive that you want to hide will affect everyone (even yourself) as there is only one user account available for everyone.

In method 2, the drive that you want to hide will affect only the account that you select. To do this you will need to logon to the computer with the username and password that you want to hide the drive from and this account must have the rights to be able to edit the registry. If you want to hide a drive from multiple profiles then you will need to make the changes under each of the affected profiles. You can hide the C: on a profile, with the D: drive being hidden on a different profile, or even hide the D: and E: on one profile and the E: and G: on another. It is possible to have any combination you want.

Here is how it can be done:

Click Start, Run and type regedit. Click on OK and you will have the Windows Registry open in front of you.

Go to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies
\Explorer

Add a new DWORD value called NoDrives and give this a decimal value that corresponds (x) to the drive(s) that you want to hide. You can look at the table below to see what value will need to be input into this field.

The changes will take effect the next time you reboot your computer.

Here is the values table that you will need to use to hide the dive(s).

• To hide multiple drives you will need to add up the decimal values of the drives in question. If for example you wanted to hide drives C: and E: then the decimal value to input into the NoDrives field would be:
  4(C:) + 16(E:) = 20.
  
  
• Because it is easier to work in decimal instead of hexadecimal, all of the examples in this tip have been provided in decimal format.