Guides

How to Hide a Drive in Windows 10/11

To Hide a Drive on your Windows 10 and 11, here's a guide for you.

By David Garcia

All your internal and external disks and drives on your Windows PC are displayed on your File Explorer. These drives may have some sensitive files for which access must be restricted. In such cases, hiding the Drive on your Windows 10/11 PC becomes the best option for you, and you can hide a drive in a few easy steps mentioned in this guide.

How to Hide a Drive in Windows 10/11

You can hide Drive on your system in the following ways:

1. Using Disk Management App to Hide a Drive

Hide a Drive using Disk Management Tool

Disk Management tool is useful in performing storage-related tasks. Also, it is a useful tool to hide the drive partition on your Windows. You can hide any Drive with the Disk Management tool by following these steps:

  • The first step is to open Disk Management either by typing and clicking on ‘Create and format hard Disk partition’ on the search bar or by opening the Run dialog and entering ‘diskmgmt.msc’
  • On the Disk Management window you will see the list of all drives on your device, right click on the Drive you want to hide.
  • Select ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths’ from the menu, and a small window will pop up, from there, select remove.
  • Sometimes a warning message appears if your Drive contains large files.
  • Click on ‘Yes’ to hide the Drive.
  • The Drive will disappear from the File Explorer.

2. Hide a Drive with Diskpart Command

Hide a Drive using Diskpart Command

  • Open Command Prompt and type Diskpart.
  • Enter it to open a new prompt.
  • On the Diskpart, you will need to type your disk volume letter in this format: Select Volume # (here # represents any desired volume letter)
  • The command prompt will show a response like this: Volume 1 is selected (the number can be any number given to a specific drive)
  • Now type ‘Remove letter #’
  • Diskpart will respond with a message like “Diskpart successfully removed the drive letter or mount point”
  • The Drive will be removed from your Windows.

3. Use Registry Editor

Hide a Drive using Registry Editor

This is a risky method. But Registry Editor can easily hide a drive. However, if you mess with your Registry too much, and don’t have a Windows Registry backup might malfunction your system. Follow the steps given below:

  • Open Registry Editor and type this shortcut path on the Registry Address bar: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
  • Now right-click on the Explorer key, hover your cursor on New to open a sub-menu, and select DWORD (32-bit) Value.
  • Right-click on the new DWORD key, select rename from the menu and rename DWORD to NoDrives.
  • Now Double-click and open the NoDrives key, and the Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value dialog box will appear.
  • Select Decimal from the base and enter the number corresponding to your disk drive on your Value data.
  • To get the corresponding number to your Drive, just multiply the Drive letter by two. For example, The correspondence number of drive volume ‘A’ is 1, ‘B’ is ‘2’, C is 4, ‘D’ is 8, and so on. If you want to hide all the drives, then type 67108863 on the value data.
  • Click on ‘OK’ and exit the registry editor.
  • After that restart, your desktop and your Drive will hide.

That’s everything covered on how to hide a drive in Windows 10/11. Also, check out our guide on how to remove the green check mark on desktop icons of Windows 10/11, or if you want to see seconds on your Windows 11 taskbar, our guide on it will help you.