Prevent Access to Specific Partition or Drive

How to Prevent Access to Specific Partition or Drive?

Sometimes we would like to prevent users from accessing tons of data. We can do this by hiding the drive but it does not prevent the access completely. This trick will not hide the drive but users cannot access it. After preventing access, you can hide the drive to ensure full protection. 

Steps:

1. Log into the account where you want the users not to access the drive
2. Click Start>Run
3. Type regedit and open it
4. Navigate to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER >> Software >> Microsoft >> Windows >>CurrentVersion>> Policies >> Explorer
5. Right-click to create a new DWORD value with the name 'NoViewOnDrive'
6. Double-Click on this entry, Select the radio button named 'Decimal'
7. In the value data field put the value of the drive you want to prevent access
8. The value is calculated using the formula '2^n-1', where n is the number of the drive which you want to prevent access-1 for A, 2 for B, 3 for C and so on...
9. If you need to hide more than one drive, add the respective drive numbers and enter it into the value data field. For example, to hide drive C you need to enter 4 (2 ^3-1); to hide drives D and E you need to enter 24 (2 ^4-1 +2 ^5-1)

More: To apply the changes to all the users in the system, follow the same method above by navigating to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE >> Software >> Microsoft >> Windows >>CurrentVersion>> Policies >> Explorer

To Un-hide the drives, Delete the entry that you created above either from Current_User key or Local_Machine key, wherever you have created the key to hide the drives.