Hide drives from My Computer

Here’s how to hide drive letters from within My Computer.  When users open My Computer from the desktop, they will see an icon for each drive on the system.  With the following Registry change, you can hide these icons, preventing users from finding them and using them.

Why would you want to do this? Well, apart from the obvious shifty method of hiding your stuff, it’s VERY useful in terminal server environments where you want to hide the potentially sensitive system drives, local floppy disk or CD-ROM drives. Not so silly now, eh? Remember that you can still access these drives by typing the drive letter directly (for instance in an Open/Save/Run dialog box). I’ll dig out another tweak later to show how to crack down on this too!

Open Registry Editor and navigate to:

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

Create a DWORD value and name it NoDrives. As for it’s value, you’ll need to work it out depending on what drives you wish to hide. Simply add them together from the following list. The total is what you’ll use for the the NoDrives value.

A=1
B=2
C=4
D=8
E=16
F=32
G=64
H=128
I=256
J=512
K=1024
L=2048
M=4096
N=8192
O=16384
P=32768
Q=65536
R=131072
S=262144
T=524288
U=1048576
V=2097152
W=4194304
X=8388608
Y=16777216
Z=33554432

For examply, if you want to hide drives A, C and D the value would be 13 (1 + 4 + 8).

Please make sure that you backup your registry BEFORE carrying out this modification, etc, etc, etc!