By hiding a partition or drive you can prevent others to access the files that are stored in that particular drive. It is a good idea to hide the drive where you save all your confidential and personal files. It will provide extra protection to your data, specially when you are sharing your PC with others. Here are some tricks to hide your hard drive partition. Before you follow the steps make sure that you have opened your computer with administrator privileged.
How to hide a selected drive or partition
- Click right mouse on the my computer and select Manage. Select the disk management under storage.
- Right click on the drive which you want to hide and select Change Drive Letters and Paths.
- Now select remove. (This action will remove the drive letter, not the drive.)
- A warning message will be shown, Click on OK to conform.
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Now the selected drive will be hidden from my computer. The above steps only remove the name of the drive not the content stored in it. Windows can’t identify any drive or partition without its name, and your drive will be hidden from others. You can again assign the drive name by following the below steps.
How to unhide a hidden partition or drive
- Right click on My Computer then click on storage to open the Disk Management.
- Right click on the drive which is hidden/removed. (The hidden drive doesn’t contain any drive letter.)
- Choose the Change Drive Letters and Paths, then select Add to add drive letter or path to the hidden drive.
- Choose a drive letter to assign the drive or partition, then press OK.
Hide a selected drive using Group policy
- Open the Run window type gpedit.msc and press enter to open the group policy editor.
- Go to User Configuration and click the “+” (plus sign) next to it.
- Go to Administration Template and click the “+” (plus sign) next to it.
- Go to Windows Components and click the “+” (plus sign) next to it.
- Click on Windows Explorer.
- Right click on Hide these specific drives in my computer and
- Select Properties.
- Select the box next to Enabled.
- Click the arrow next to Restrict All Drives and select the drives you want to hide.
- Click on Apply then OK.
- Close the group policy editor.
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You can also use third party software to hide a hard disk partition or drive on your computer.