Hide a drive in Windows XP

You can prevent users tampering with or viewing a drive by hiding it with a useful registry tweak.

Assuming you want to do this with individual users, go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre nt Version\Policies\Explorer.

Create a DWORD value and call it NoDrives, the value that you give it will determine which drives will be made invisible. Use *decimal* values and hide drives by using the following numbers depending on the drive letter:

A: 1 B: 2 C: 4 D: 8
E: 16 F: 32 G: 64 H: 128
I: 256 J: 512 K: 1024 L: 2048

You get the picture To hide two or more drives, you need to add their values together, for example to hide C and D, add 4 + 8 and enter the decimal value 12.

In addition, to prevent Run, Map Network Drive, or the Dir command being used to view the contents of folders, you can create another DWORD called NoViewOnDrive, and use the same values given above. Logging off and back on again is needed to make the changes take effect.

You can make these changes on the whole system by editing the same key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and you can hide all drives by setting the decimal value at 67108863, but I can't really see anyone wanting to it!