How to hide specified drives from showing up in My Computer on Windows

In this Windows How-To article you are going to learn the step-by-step instructions to hide certain hard drives that you specified from showing up in My Computer and from the Windows Explorer to keep your data a little bit safer.

There are times when people have only one computer and they have to share it with family members or friends. Many times the people you share the computer with are not tech savvies, and you may not want them to be saving or deleting files in Windows “C” drive or in another hard drive that may have data that you are not open to share with everyone.

What you can do in this case is use the Local Computer Policy in Windows to enable a setting to remove the icons representing selected hard drives from My Computer and from the Windows Explorer, plus the drive letters from the selected hard drivers will not appear in the standards Open dialog box. And the process is not that complicated.

Note: By hiding specified drives, you can still be able to access to the drive content by using other methods, like using a path to a directory, using the Run command, or from the command prompt. But it will not be that easy for regular users.

How to hide specified hard drives on Windows

1. Use the + R keyboard shortcut to bring the Run command, type mmc, and click OK to open the Windows Console.

2. From the Console’s File menu, click Add/Remove Snap-ins, select the Group Policy Object Editor on the left from the available snap-ins and click Add, then click Finish and OK.

Group Policy Object Editor - Windows

3. On the left pane, expand the Local Computer Policy, User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, and selectWindows Explorer.

Console -Local Computer Policy

4. From the list of settings in the right side, double-click “Hide these specified drives in My Computer”.

5. Then click Enabled, and in the Options section, pick from one of the combinations available to hide the hard drives that you don’t want everybody to see. If you want to know more about this setting, you can read an extensive explanation in the Help section.

6. Once you have chosen what drives to hide, click Apply and then OK.

Now, it is not going to be that easy for regular users to access certain locations.

My Computer - Hard Disk Drives section

In the case you want to revert to the old settings, go back to the Hide these specified drives in My Computers settings and choose the option Do not restrict drivers, click Apply. Then select the option Not Configured and one more time click Apply and OK to finish.

Do you have any Windows Tips? Tell us in the comments below.