paulsynnott.com » hide drive http://www.paulsynnott.com/blog Did you get lost? What are you doing here? Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:13:15 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 How to: Hide drives in Explorer http://www.paulsynnott.com/blog/2009/04/08/how-to-hide-drives-in-explorer/ http://www.paulsynnott.com/blog/2009/04/08/how-to-hide-drives-in-explorer/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:48:45 +0000 psynnott http://www.paulsynnott.com/blog/?p=90 Explorer.exe: Insert Disk
Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time in Explorer, copying multiple CDs and DVDs to a hard drive. When I ejected a disc, Explorer tries to select the following letter after the CD/DVD drive. This causes an error on my computer as the next drive is a multiformat card reader with no media in it. Usually this is not a problem and I just click “OK” and continue on my way, but I have 400 discs to copy and the thought of clicking “OK” 400 times is not my idea of fun.

There is a fix however! Hide the drives. This way, Explorer won’t pop up the error because it can’t see the drive. This may not work for everyone, but it does for me. I rarely use the media reader so it is more convenient for me to just unhide the drives again when I’m finished with my disc copying.

Thanks to http://www.pcdrome.com where I found the following tweak:

Open your registry and find or create the key below.

The “NoDrives” value uses a 32-bit word to define local and network drive visibility for each logical drive in the computer. The lower 26 bits of the 32-bit word correspond to drive letters A through Z. Drives are visible when set to 0 and hidden when set to 1.

If you are not happy working in Hex, add these decimal numbers to hide the drive(s):

A: 1, B: 2, C: 4, D: 8, E: 16, F: 32, G: 64, H: 128, I: 256, J: 512, K: 1024, L: 2048, M: 4096, N: 8192, O: 16384, P: 32768, Q: 65536, R: 131072, S: 262144, T: 524288, U: 1048576, V: 2097152, W: 4194304, X: 8388608, Y: 16777216, Z: 33554432, ALL: 67108863

For example to hide drive A and drive D, you would add 1 (A) + 8 (D) which means the value should be set to “9″.

To disable all the drives set the value to “67108863″.

Restart Windows for the change to take effect.

]]> http://www.paulsynnott.com/blog/2009/04/08/how-to-hide-drives-in-explorer/feed/ 0