How To Hide Drives In My Computer Of Windows 7

Posted by dkszone on January 5, 2010

Suppose you have some very private data on one of the drives on your computer and you don’t want other users sharing your PC to access them. You can either hide selected drives using a free utility such as NoDrives Manager or configure a Local Group Policy setting to get the thing done without the help of any external software.

Here are the steps to hide a drive in Windows Explorer of Windows 7/Vista:

1. Open the Local Group Policy Editor by typing ‘gpedit.msc’ in the Start Menu search box and hitting Enter.

2. In the Local Group Policy Editor window, navigate to User Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> Windows Explorer in the right side panel.

3. On the left, scroll down the list to find ‘Hide these specified drives in My Computer’. Double click on this entry to open the setting.

4. Select ‘Enabled’ and choose one of the several available drive letter combinations under the ‘Options’ section.

hide-specified-drives-in-my-computer

5. After choosing a the drives which you want to hide, click on OK to save your changes.

From now on, other users of your PC will no longer be able to view the icons of the restricted drives from My Computer or Windows Explorer. Also the drive letters will not appear in the ‘Open’ dialog box.

Note that though this method hides the chosen drives from users, it cannot prevent them from gaining access to the drive contents by typing the directory path on a drive in the Map Network Drive dialog box, the Run dialog or from the command prompt. Also it cannot stop programs or the Disk Management snap-in view to access and modify the contents on the drive.