Over the years, I have seen many people play with parts of their Windows installation when they don’t really know what they are doing. If there is a data or ‘D:\’ partition, sometimes they will go there and delete things which perhaps are part of a Windows file or image backup, or maybe driver files. Wouldn’t it be great if you could hide all the data on the drive, so the data that should not be touched, can’t be touched by the novice user?
There is obviously a very easy way to get round this, which is to remove the drive letter from the partition completely. It does have one or two drawbacks; one is that Windows 7 system image and file backup cannot backup or restore involving a drive with no letter. Another issue is you cannot use the hidden drive for read or write operations in Windows. Most partitioning software will remove the drive letter completely for you and Raymond mentioned it some time ago. Look HERE if you would like a better idea out how to do that.
The best solution would be that you can hide the drive and its letter while still being able to use it just like you can if it’s fully visible. Thankfully, there is such an option in the Windows registry which allows you to hide any logical drive letter, and it will be hidden in Windows Explorer but can still be accessed through the command prompt, the Run box and by typing it into the Address bar.
XP has a utility to take care of this without going through the registry in the form of the popular tool TweakUI, but it’s not for Vista and 7. That’s where a little tool called Nodrvman comes in, because it is compatible with XP, Vista and 7 32 and 64 bit. It also hides the drives for all users where TweakUI only does so for the currently logged on user.
Nodrvman is available as a setup file or portable zip file, but if you are hiding the drive letter from someone else, it makes sense to use the portable one. Download and extract it, then run the Nodrvman.exe to start. Accept the license and you will be presented with the main screen:
The interface is pretty simple. Tick the box for the corresponding drive to hide it, untick if it’s already ticked to unhide a currently hidden drive.
Binary and Decimal are the values that the program will enter into the registry key to hide the selected drive(s). No need to touch those.
‘Save Changes’ will commit the values to the registry and ‘Reload settings’ will reread what’s in the registry key already.
‘Set / Change Password’ is an interesting option because enter a password and every time you run Nodrvman it will ask for it. You cannot run the utility and make any changes without knowing what the password is. This isn’t particularly secure though, as it took me all of a few seconds to find the registry key where the password is stored and delete it. Good enough to keep out the average user though.
After you have hidden / unhidden what you want, click ‘Save changes’ and you will be prompted to either log off or restart Explorer. If you know how to restart Explorer, fine, otherwise it will be easier to log off and back on again.
When you log back into Windows and open an Explorer window or file / folder requester, the drive(s) will no longer be there
In the below example, drives C: and E: are going to be hidden, yes you can even do this with the C: drive as well although maybe not a great idea. Tick the C and E tick boxes in Nodrvman and click ‘Save changes’.
Restart Explorer or log off. When you get back they’re gone…
Type C: or E: into the Address bar or Search box and the hidden drive will still be fully accessible. A useful solution which leaves drives fully functional but at the same time keeps them away from users who sometimes don’t know that the files they may be moving or deleting are important and shouldn’t be touched.
Portable and setup install versions are available.
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