XP: Disable Drives Registry Hack

Contributed by William_Wilson March 15, 2006  
Tagged: Windows

Remove access to drives individually, groups or all.

*This should remove the drive letter so keep track of this change to undo if necessary!!

Each drive letter corresponds to a binary decimal number, starting from 0 going to 25:
Simply if the drive letter is C, since C is the third letter in the alphabet the number you need is 2^2 = 4 or drive A is 2^0 = 1.

To remove multiple drives simple add up there corresponding values and use that.
To Remove all drives use the value 67108863 (the sum of all drive letters A-Z)
*for interests sake this value is: (2^26) - 1, since we start at 0

Deny the current user: (need to be logged on under their account)
path: KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer

Deny for the entire computer:
path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer
*for this i would recomend you do both!

create a REG_DWORD key named NoDrives
*right click in right pane

select it and make it’s data entry the number you determined earlier. That’s it, it usually requires a restart to take effect.

*NOTE these drives still display under fileman.exe. To complete this disabling you will need to rename this file or delete it!

Questions/Comments: william_a_wilson@hotmail.com
-William. § (marvin_gohan)