Hide windows drives

It is amazing to know that we can hide windows drives. You might be aware of how to hide files and foldes, but did you know you can hide a full drive in windows?

Hiding a whole volume is fun but sometimes it becomes important also. Actually for me, It's fun to hide a full drive.

Actually the main purpose behind hiding a drive is to restrict users from viewing the contents of a particular drive. You can hide the whole drive and it can be any of your drives- d drive, e drive, or even c drive!. Yes, you can hide any of them. Once you hide a drive, it's gone! No one would even get to know about the hidden drive.

Consider an example situation where hiding a drive becomes necessary - I have kept my security passwords, important files, folders, etc. on drive E: and I don't want anyone to view the contents of that drive, so I will simply hide the drive, so that it is harder even for an advanced user to open that particular drive.

A normal PC user will not even get to know that E: drive is there, already residing on your computer because he cannot see it. But only me and you know the inside secret that it has been hidden. No one can unhide the hidden drive without using group policy editor (gpedit).

1. First go to start => run
2. In the run dialog box, type "gpegedit.msc" (without including the quotes).
3. Now you will see the group policy editor window.
4. In the group policy editor window, navigate to- Administrative Templates => Windows Components => Windows explorer
5. Now on the right pane, double click- "Hide these specified drives in my computer".
6. Now on the "Hide these specified drives in my computer properties" screen, click enabled.
7. Now in the section "pick one of the following combinations" click the down arrow to see all the drives.
8. Select one of the mentioned drives in the down arrow & click apply
9. Click OK.
10. Close the group policy editor window

Now after closing the editor, go to my computer & you will encounter that the drive you specified out of the already listed drives, is now hidden. No one will be able to view it without using gpedit.