Hide Windows Drives Policy
Monday, 25 July 2005 14:54To prevent a drive or any combination of drives from appearing in My Computer, Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer, for security purposes in a multiuser environment, if you own the computer or have Administrator privileges, add/modify the "NoDrives" (don't type the quotation marks) Binary [hex] value under this Registry key, using Regedit:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ Explorer
Give it a value from the list below to hide the individual drive of your choice (don't type the spaces):
| A = 01 00 00 00 | N = 00 20 00 00 |
Example: to hide drives D, E, Y and Z give "NoDrives" this value: 18 00 00 03 Where: D + E = 18 and Y + Z = 03 (cumulative values).
NOTE: These numbers are in HEXadecimal. Example: to hide drives A, B, C and D, use 0F, NOT 15, when cumulating multiple drives.You can also do this by using TweakUI, one of the Microsoft Power Toys for Windows 9x/NT4/2000/ME [110 KB, free, unsupported].
Show all drives (A to Z) "NoDrives" value: 00 00 00 00
Hide all drives (A to Z) value: FF FF FF 03
Use TweakUI with caution, ONLY AFTER BACKING UP YOUR REGISTRY! Open Control Panel ---> TweakUI ---> My Computer tab ---> check to show or uncheck to hide the desired drive boxes ---> click OK/Apply.
Windows 9x default is to show ALL local and remote (network) drives: A to Z.
TO DO:
&==& All these settings apply also to the "NoDriveTypeAutoRun" Binary [hex] value, to enable/disable the AutoRun feature on selected drives (useful for disabling AutoRun on cd-roms), and found also at:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ Explorer