Vista - Drive - Hide or Unhide

your a sickkkk guy, its all working..
u know alot aboutt these type of stuff,,
and u reply back quick aswell...

thnx alot for the help mannn.
i will get back if i need further help..

You're most welcome.

Brink,

Excellent tutorial on this subject and much great detail. I have a question and a comment.

1st off what I have found is to hide specific drives, you have to ADD the values together and use that number.

For instance to hide drives E and F it would be this:
E=16 F=32 so 16+32=48 When you place this value, you MUST first select decimal and input the value. When you click ok it is transformed to it's hex value so by inputting 48 decimal I get this value:

"NoDrives"=dword:00000030(48)

Now for my question, I am trying this with Win7 and it isn't working as well. I merge my reg file, I check the registry and it is not changed :-( I am Admin. I logout and Login and the drives that appear in my computer are not as expected but the reg value is not correct. Go figure.. Any Ideas? appreciate any feedback.

Hello Cfoam, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Thank you for sharing this.

All Windows 7 questions would get better replies at our sister site Seven Forums instead though.

OK, I gues I'll have to go signup there too...

One more thing I noticed about this - still looking for info - it also happened on Vista.

You can use group policy settings but they only offer certain drives
You can do the reg entry manual method but are we sure which reg keys get the entry?

HKLM, HKCU, Hum. while trying to track this issue down I searched the reg for the NoDrives entry and nothing came up. OK, Then I went looking manually and guess what I found???

It was there in this key:

[HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-1719447127-1121268693-3747253166-1000\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
What the heck is this key and where did it come from. I only have 2 users on the box. Anyway, I had saved the registry before I started messing with this yesterday and now trying to get it back to where I was, I tried to merge it back and it choked - couldn't import file.... WTF?? Any ideas?

Manually searching for NoDrives and deleting hte entry seemed to help, of course running as Admin.
Thanks.

Not sure, but I'm happy to hear that it seems that you got it sorted.

Hi there!

Im using vista home premium. I found 2 hiden drive without letter.

one is> Healthy (EISA Configuration)
second> Healthy (Primary Partition)


third is C
foruth is D

Can anybody help me about that. I cant unhide thouse drives. I think they are backup drives.


Thank you!!!

Hello Slovenski, and welcome to Vista Forums.

If you have a store bought OEM computer (ex: Gateway, Dell, etc....), then these may be your Vista and Applications & Drivers recovery partitions. If they are, then you will not want to mess with them if you ever needed to use them to restore your Vista installation back to factory condition.

Yes they are recovery partitions, but if i want to recovery system or application how can i do it?

from control panel : backup and restore center?

or do i unhide these partitions?


Thank you again.


And sorry for my bad english. lol

Slovenski,

What brand and model is your computer?

Do not mess with these partitions though. Doing so can make them unusable to restore Vista if needed.