How to disable access to Drives using Disk Management

One of the visitors of SI, Joseph, recently asked in a comment to the post “How to disable access to specific drives with registry” how he could disable  access to a drive even for programs like Ashampoo which managed to override the registry trick. This is the trick you can use to prevent such sotware from accessing your drives. In one of the previous posts we had discussed how to Manage disk drives using Disk drive management console Object of Windows. We can use the Management Console to disable access to select drives also.

  1. Open the Disk Management Console

To open the Disk Management Console type “diskmgmt.msc” into the RUN dialog box and press ENTER.

Enter diskmgmt.msc into the RUN dialog and press ENTER

  1. Select the Drive

All the Drives in the storage devices connected to your computer will be listed here. Select the drive to which you want to prevent access and right click on it. Now select the option “Change Drive Letter and Paths..”

Right click on the drive and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths.."

  1. Remove the drive letter assignment

In the Dialog that opens, click “Remove” and then “Yes” if prompted for confirmation.

Remove the drive letter assignment.

  1. Hooray, you have disabled access to the drive

The change takes effect immediately. If it doesn’t, the try restarting windows explorer as explained.

The drive is removed from any sort of navigation..


The above mentioned trick will prevent everyone from accessing the drive for read or write purposes. Checkout the related posts for more…

Some related articles you may like :

  1. How to view all drives, Disk Management under Windows
  2. How to prevent access to select drives using Registry
  3. Free Disk tools to analyse Disk usage graphically
  4. How to Disable Autoplay/Autorun
  5. Microsoft Management Console – make administrative tasks easy
  6. Get access to all folders in Windows like Linux
  7. Download the free software to shred files
  8. Change the default Drive Icons in Windows XP

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One Comment

  1. John
    Posted February 5, 2012 at 6:55 PM | Permalink

    If I have a dual boot system, can I use this to block all other drives on the second installation (leaving just the current Window’s drive)? Or would removing access to the other version of Windows prevent that installation from booting?

    Basically I’m just wondering if these changes only apply to the current version of Windows or if they will affect multiple installations.

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