Hide Drives from Your Computer in Windows 7

WindowsIf you’ve got drives in My Computer that you never access, such as a USB Flash drive that is used s olely for MagicJack, a floppy drive, or a network drive only used for a particular piece of software, then you might want to hide the drive from your computer, so it doesn’t bother you.

Now note, that this just hides the drive from view, the drive will still be accessible from the command prompt or typing the drive letter in manually.

In this example the V: drive is the magic jack drive and I just don’t need to see the drive, as when I have USB drives and such plugged in it’s just one more thing I don’t need to look at.

HardDriveView

NOTE: These following steps require you to modify the registry on your local computer, as with every registry modification, please back up your registry prior to going any further.

Open up regedit.exe by using the start menu search box, and then browse down to the following key.

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

If the Explorer key does not exist, you can right-click on Policies, select New Key and name it Explorer.

The NoDrives key should not exist by default, so you’ll need to create it with right-click -> new 32-bit DWORD and name it NoDrives.

Reg

Creating the DWord will ask for a Hex or Decimal value so that you can select the drive to be hidden.

EditDWord

I’ve done the hard work for you, and compiled the list of drives below so that you don’t have to do the work.


Drive Letter


Decimal

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
All Letters 67108863

Now the changes aren’t instant, you’ll either need to restart your computer, or you can go to the task manager stop the explorer.exe process and then go to the file ->New Task and type explorer.exe and that will restart it.

Look, now that pesky MagicJack drive is hidden: Drive V Missing

*NOTE: This works on Windows Vista

To Unhide the Drive

To unhide the drive at any point, you just simply browse to the registry path and delete the newly created NoDrives key, then the drive will reappear during the next reboot.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.