How to create an "Invisible" hidden drive in Windows

Posted on October 13, 2007 at 11:04 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Hide Files and Folders series!

How to hide files and folders in Windows XP – The easy way
How to create a secured and locked folder in Windows XP
Another way to hide files and folders in Windows XP
How to create an "Invisible" hidden drive in Windows

You’ve probably read a bunch of posts on how to create hidden folders, secure folders, locked folders, etc, etc in Windows on many occasions! Hell, one of the most popular articles on this blog is How to create a secure and locked folder in Windows XP. However, hiding a folder is a tricky proposition and usually doesn’t work well unless you use something like Truecrypt.

But there’s yet ANOTHER way you can hide your “private” files using a nifty little registry hack that will completely remove an entire drive from your computer. The drive will not show up in My Computer, will not be accessible from the command prompt, and won’t even show up in Safe Mode!

Ok, so here’s how to implement the hack: first off, back up your registry as this requires adding a key to the registry. Once you’ve backed up your registry, open the registry editor by clicking on Start, Run and typing in regedit.

Now navigate to the following registry hive shown below:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
Policies\Explorer

Right-click on Explorer and choose New and then DWORD Value.

Name the new value NoDrives and then double click on it to open the properties dialog box. Click on Decimal for the Base unit.

Type in one of the following values depending on that drive letter you want to hide.

A: 1B: 2C: 4D: 8

E: 16

F: 32G: 64H: 128I: 256

J: 512

K: 1024L: 2048M: 4096N: 8192

O: 16384

P: 32768Q: 65536R: 131072S: 262144

T: 524288

U: 1048576V: 2097152W: 4194304X: 8388608

Y: 16777216

Z: 33554432All: 67108863

If you want to hide drive E, just type in the value 16. The really cool thing about this trick is the fact that you can hide multiple drives by adding the numbers of the particular drives together. For example, if you want to hide drive E and drive G, you would type in the number 80, which is 64 + 16.

Restart your computer and your drive will now be hidden! Trying to hide your system drive (C) will not work as Windows has to use this drive to run correctly, so don’t store your secret files there!

When you want to get your drives back, change the value of NoDrives to 0 or simply delete the value altogether. Of course, having to do this everyday can be a pain, so if you’re up for it, you can try and write a registry file that will allow you to insert and delete the value by just double-clicking a file.

This trick also works for mapped drives, so if you want to hide mapped drives, you can do it this way (though it might just be easier to disconnect a mapped drive).

Enjoy!

Source via MindConnection

[tags]hidden drives, hide drives, how to hide a hard drive, hide local drives, hide mapped drives, hide hdd[/tags]

» Filed Under Computer Tips

Comments

17 Responses to “How to create an "Invisible" hidden drive in Windows”

Darren Lovelock said on : October 13th, 2007 at 2:21 pm

Or you could just buy an external hard drive and disconnect it…

BPPG said on : October 13th, 2007 at 4:30 pm

This would probably work well for hard drive partitions, as well.

akishore said on : October 13th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

Yes it’ll work for partitions also. It can prove to be useful for some people I guess.

OOOOOOOOOOR said on : October 13th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

You use “Hide Folders XP” and hide specific folders. :p

bob said on : October 13th, 2007 at 8:47 pm

Or you could just use the “My Computer” tab in the Microsoft TweakUI control panel applet.

visweswar said on : April 9th, 2008 at 8:59 pm

hi this is good..

Narendra Deo Pandey said on : April 30th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

Sir,
I have a problem with my E drive
its automatically hides all files and folders from
drive.Now i can not see any contents from E drive
When i go it(E drive) property,its show how many
GB data in this drive.
I had all efforts(like showing hidden files etc)
to showing my contents but i was unable
to see any of.

dr vineet said on : June 1st, 2008 at 2:53 am

i also had similar problem narendra.
then i searched the internet a lot….. finally what i could find out was that it is some sort of virus which could escape detection and creates this mess.
i advise you to take a back up of all your important data somewhere else and format your complete hard drive, repartition it or that thing will grow and slowly consume more and more folders. Good Luck

Harry J said on : June 23rd, 2008 at 6:09 am

Hi there,
I have worked through the other three folder-hiding techniques and they all worked perfectly. So cheers for those excellent tutorials. However, when I cam to this one (which I left to last as it was obviously a little more technical) I’ve come across a problem – I’m in the regedit and I’ve gotten this far:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
policies\
However, Explorer isn’t visible. In your example there are five subfolders, the first being Attachments and the second being Explorer. I only seem to have the final three (NonEnum, Ratings & system). How come I don’t have explorer, and is there somewhere else I could find it?
Thanks for any help.

Waqas Azeem said on : July 2nd, 2008 at 7:09 pm

salaam………
this is a difficult method i have an easy method for hide Drive

1. Run type “gpedit.msc”
2.In “USER CONFIGURATION” Expand “Administrative Templates”
3.Expand “WINDOWS COMPONENTS”
4.Now Only Click On “WINDOWS EXPLORER
5.In Another Side Of Window U Can Find 10th Or 11th Option Wich Was “Hide These Specified Drives In My Computer

Harry J said on : July 3rd, 2008 at 3:51 am

Woh, cheers man! That’s awesome! However, as it happens, it only gives you the ability to hide A-D drives which is pretty oldschool as I was looking into hiding partitions or external hard drives and stuff. Still, you showed me to an area of my computer that I was not farmiliar with so thanks for that!

Vanbiaka said on : November 6th, 2008 at 11:49 am

Another secure way of hiding a partition or Hard Drive that you dont want to be displayed on ‘My computer Explorer’ is
1. Right Click on My Computer – select “manage”
2. On Disk management Right Click on the drive you want to hide (Eg. E drive)
3. Select Change Drive Letter and paths
5. “Remove”
6. Warning about ’some program to no longer run’ would appear, click ‘YES’ to continue

When you want the drive (partition) back, just repeat the same and this time, instead of “REMOVE” there will be “ADD”

Thats it

Harry J said on : November 7th, 2008 at 12:21 pm

I was actually aware of that as I often find my self in the Manage folder in order to deal with drives/disks which disappear from time to time as a result of windows being… well, windows lol. But yeah, thanks again, any and all tech advice is extremely useful.

tom said on : January 18th, 2009 at 1:34 pm

vanbiaka,
when you remove a disk through disk management tool does it erase the files on that drive?

Martin said on : October 5th, 2009 at 6:56 am

Thanks so much. This really is spot on and exactly what we needed to achieve. Well Done Mate.

Denis said on : November 14th, 2009 at 5:17 pm

Well, it iwll hide the drive in Explorer, but not in file browsers like Total Commander or Far.

It is better to use some specialized software like BDV DataHider, freeware BDV Secret Folder or some other data hiding utilities.

Start looking from here: http://www.bdvnotepad.com/secretfolder_en.htm

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