Hide a Drive From File Explorer Without Unmounting on Windows 10
File Explorer lists all drives that are configured on your system. This includes reserved drives, local drives, external drives, USB drives, and network drives. The reserved or recovery drive is normally hidden and you cannot access it. You can hide a drive from File Explorer from the Disk Management app but that also makes the drive itself inaccessible. If you want to hide a drive from File Explorer, but still be able to access it, you need a little registry hack.
Please note, you will need administrative rights to edit the Windows registry.
Hide A Drive From File Explorer
Open the Windows registry editor by typing ‘regedit’ in the run box. In the registry editor, go to the following location;
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Right-click the Explorer key and select New>DWORD (32-bit) value. Name the value NoDrives and double-click it to edit it. In the DWORD value’s box, change its Base value from Hexadecimal to Decimal. Now, you need to edit the value in the Value Data field.
The value you enter in the Value Data field depends on which drive it is you want to hide. Open File Explorer and check the letter assigned to the drive you want to hide. From the list below, check which value corresponds to the drive you want to hide, and enter it in the Value Data field. For example, if you want to hide the E drive, you will enter 16.
- 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
After you add the value, close the registry editor, log out and log back in again. The drive will be hidden from File Explorer however, you can still access it and all folders and files in it.
To access the hidden drive, click inside the location bar in File Explorer and enter the drive letter. For example, if you want to open the hidden E drive, you will enter;
E:/
This will list all files and folders at the root of the E drive. You can freely navigate the drive. If you have the path to a specific folder or file in the drive, you can paste it into the location bar, tap Enter, and access it.
If you need to hide multiple drives, you need to add their values and then enter the sum in the Value Data field. For example, if you want to hide the C and D drive, you will add their values i.e., 4 + 8. The value you enter will be 12. To unhide the drive, you can set the value of this DWORD value to 0, or you can delete it. You will need to restart your system.
