How to Protect Your Data Hiding a Drive

Hiding a data from a different person who uses your computer has been a problem since years.I have already written two more articles on this topic (A handy and secured way to Hide Files and Folders in Windows XP and Hide your Secret files behind JPEG image).

This time I demonstrate a new and very effective way to hide your essentials.You can bag all secret files and folders into a drive(partition) and hide that very drive. Not only anyone would think about the existence of a drive but also the drive will not be accessible from the command prompt, and won’t be visible in safe mode.Therefore, this trick must be pretty useful to you.

Actually hiding a drive can be done in two ways. First one is using command prompt.And the second is just applying a tweak in your Registry Editor.

Hiding A Drive using Command Prompt

• click on Start and then Run,type cmd and press enter.Your command prompt window will open.
• Type diskpart and press enter. Now diskpart session opens.
• Type list volume in the command prompt.You will see the list of volumes(partitions/drives) along with their letter names.
• To select volume 3(D drive here in example) type select volume 3 and press enter.
• To hide it type remove letter E .A message like below would come.Now your D drive is hidden as soon you restart the machine.To recover it just navigate to the list of volumes as before and type assign letter E.Just restart your PC to see your secrets back again.

Hiding Drive using Registry Tweak

• Go to Start menu and click on Run then type regedit and press enter.This will open the Registry Editor.

• From the left pane navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersion PoliciesExplorer

• Right click on explorer select New and then DWORD value.

• Set the Value name as no drives and select Decimal as the base unit.
• These are the corresponding values of the drives
  

  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

  Y:16777216 Z:33554432

  All:67108863

• To hide drive E,type 16 as the value data,or to hide drive L,type 2048.

If multiple drives needs to be hidden,just add the corresponding decimal numbers of the drives and type it.As a example for hiding drive E and drive H,just add 16 with 128 and type the result.For hiding all drives type 67108863.You have to just restart your PC to see your secret drives hidden.

It should be noted that hiding drive C where your system files reside,can be turn up as a problem.So it’s better not to keep your essentials there. To recover the those drives, just set no drive value as 0 and restart your PC.