If you’re a computer user, you know that it’s important to keep your drives hidden from view. Windows 7 and Vista offer a number of ways to do this, but there are a few things you need to be aware of in order to make sure your drives are hidden. One way to hide drives is to use the “Hide Drives” feature in the “Computer” section of the “My Computer” window. This will hide all but the first drive in your computer’s hard drive. If you want to hide other drives, you can use the “Hidden Drives” option in the “Drive Properties” window on the left side of the window. Another way to hide drives is to use one of Windows 7 or Vista’s built-in features, such as “Customize Desktop”. This will add a new drive icon at the bottom of your desktop, and it will be hidden from view. You can also use this feature in order to hide individual drives from view by using one of Windows 7 or Vista’s tools, such as “Manage Drives”.
This tip will only hide the drive from being displayed, applications and the command prompt will still have access to it, and you can still manually browse to the folder if you type in the path.
Now what’s that floppy drive doing there?
Configure the Hidden Drives
Open up regedit.exe by using the start menu search box, and then browse down to the following key.
If the Explorer key does not exist, you can right-click on Policies, select New Key and name it Explorer.
The NoDrives key most likely does not exist by default, so you’ll need to create it with right-click \ new 32-bit DWORD and name it NoDrives.
This value is a 32 bit number, and the bits are arranged in reverse order with a value of 1 hiding that drive. For example, if we wanted to hide drives A: and F: we would arrange it like this:
Converting 100001 to decimal we end up with a decimal value of 33 or a hex value of 0x21, so if you double-click on the key in the registry editor, choose Decimal and then enter 33 into the value field.
In order to see these changes, you’ll need to restart explorer.exe, which you can do easily from Task Manager or the longer way by just logging off and back on.
Uninstall Tweak
To disable this tweak, simply remove the NoDrives registry key entirely.
Reference Info
Here’s a list of the values you’ll want to enter for a few different drive letters.
If you want to hide multiple drives, you’ll need to use the table of all the drive letters to figure out the correct binary code, and then convert that to decimal or hex. (hint: you can use the calculator in scientific mode)
Look, now that worthless floppy drive is gone!
Naturally it would be better to disable the floppy drive in your BIOS, but this tip is still valid for other types of drives.
Note that this also works on Windows XP.
