How to hide a drive on Windows 10 or 11

So you’re looking to hide a drive on your Windows 10 or 11? Although almost all computers—be it Windows or some other obscure operating system—keep your Windows drives on availability by default, usually on File Explorer.

However, that itself comes with drawbacks. In this article, we’re going to cover the exact steps to hide your drives on Windows. So let’s get started.

How to hide a drive on Windows 10 or 11

While hiding your drive is undoubtedly not a bulletproof way to protect the security of your drive, it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Basically, you can think of it as an extra layer of security added on top of an already well-established cyberinfrastructure.

To hide your drive on Windows, you have three different methods to pick from:

1. Disk Management
2. Hide your drive by Diskpart Command
3. Hiding the Group Policy

We’ll cover all of these steps one by one. So let’s get started.

1. Hide your drive with Disk Management

With the help of Disk Management, you can hide your drive in a couple of steps. First, you’ve to mount your drive as a folder instead of a drive letter. After you’ve listed it as a folder, hiding it becomes super easy.

 Here’s how to open the Disk Management:

• Press the Windows key + X shortcut and select Disk Management.
• Right-click on the drive you’d like to hide, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
• Select the drive you’d like to save and click on Remove.
• Click on Remove.
• Again, click on Yes.
• Right-click on the drive again and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
• Click on Add and select Mount in the following empty NTFS folder.
• Select Browse and pick the location where you’d like to create a mount point.
• Now, click on New Folder and give a new name to your folder.
• Select OK.

Now that we’re done with mounting, let’s head to File Explorer and finalize the hiding of your drive. Here’s how:

1. Open the File Explorer.
2. Head to the path of the file.
3. Right-click on the mount, and select Properties.
4. In the Attributes section, click on the Hidden option.
5. Click on Apply.
6. Select the Apply changes to this folder only option and click on OK.
7. Again, select OK.

That’s it — your drive will be hidden from the File Explorer from here on.

2. Hide your drive on Windows by Diskpart Command

You can do a lot of stuff with the help of Command prompt, the default command line interpreter of Windows. Luckily, you can also use it to hide your Windows drive as well.

Here’s how:

• Head to the Start menu search bar, type in ‘cmd,’ and select the best match.
• In the Cmd, type in ‘diskpart’ and hit Enter.
• Now, type in the following command in the new console menu and press Enter:
  list volume

• From here, note down the letter of the drive you want to hide.
• Then type in the following command below to hide your drive:

  select volume X

  Here, make sure you replace ‘X’ with the drive’s letter you noted earlier.

• Now type in the following command to hide the drive and hit Enter:

  remove letter X

• Lastly type in the following command and hit Enter:

  remove letter X

That’s it—the drive will be removed from your Windows File Explorer.

3. Hide your drive using Group Policy

Group Policy is a free, internal tool that lets you easily manage your Windows user configuration and settings. For instance, we’ve covered how you can remove Cortana on your Windows 10 using Group Policy Editor.  In this case, it also comes handy with configuring a wide range of settings of your Windows drive. Also, you must remember that Group Policy Editor is unavailable for Windows Home. So you need to be using either the Windows Pro or Windows Enterprise.

If you have the Group Policy Editor on your Windows, then follow the steps below:

1. Press the Windows key + R to open the Run dialog box.
2. There, type in ‘gpedit.msc’ and click OK.
3. Select Yes for the User Account Control (UAC) dialog box.
4. Now, from the Local Group Policy Editor window, click on User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer.
5. From the right side, double-click on Hide these specified drives in My Computer.
6. Select Enabled.
7. Under Options, choose the driver you want.
8. Click on Allow > OK.

If you’ve followed the above steps as it is, then you should not face any trouble in hiding your Window drive.

Hiding your drive on Windows 10 or 11

Hiding or removing your Windows drive doesn’t have to be troublesome. We hope that reading and going through the above methods confirmed that for you, and you’ve been able to hide your drive on Windows with ease.