How to hide your hard disk partitions

I have always wished that I could hide my hard disk's partitions. This can be a good way of protecting your important files from the people around you who never miss any opportunity to sneak into your PC. Or it can be a really funny and maybe a cruel prank for someone who is still a novice to computers! But someone smart enough to disable this registry tweak or simply by using a little bit of common sense can have access to your drives in no time. So this is not the best way to hide your stuff from people hoping nobody will find it. I would recommend it to be played as a prank.

This trick hides all your local or networked drives. It does not deletes or disables them. So rest assured you can get them back the way they were before. This is how you hide your drives:

1.Open Start > Run and type regedit. The registry editor window opens up.

2.Find your way to HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\Curre ntVersion\Policies\ Explorer.

3.In the right hand side pane, create a new DWORD value and set its value as 3FFFFFF (Hexadecimal)

4.Now close window and restart your computer.

5.When the PC starts, open My Computer. All your drives would have gone. Only the Document folders will be there. But if you enter the path of any folder located in any drive such as C:/Program Files/Microsoft you can open that folder. So, anyone brainy enough to think of this can enter any drive.

6.To enable display of drives in My Computer as it was before, just delete the DWORD entry that you created in the registry editor and restart your PC.

Write Protect Your Pen Drive/USB Drive

Write protection was one of the most useful feature in floppies. It allowed prevented any data to be written on the disk's surface, just by sliding a small slider. USB drives have now replaced floppies but still write protection is not a standard feature in all USB drives. Sure, some pen drives do come with this nifty feature but most of them lack it.

Write protection allows the user to read from the drive but not write on it. It is the best way to stay away from viruses. So, if you have write protection on, you dont have to worry about viruses getting into your pendrive. 

There is a little nifty utility to write protect a pen drive. Its very tiny in size and offcourse its portable. Its available in multiple languages like English, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, etc. Its only 187 KB in size. Now even if your friends PC has a virus, then also you can insert your pen drive in it without thinking. Download it from here.