Hide Drive Letters in Windows Explorer

If you are using the Windows Explorer to browse your file system, you will see a list of all disk drives in your system. Each drive will show a drive letter and a drive label. Considering that the drive label can be changed, you might not want to see the drive letter at all anymore. Useful driver labels can easily replace the driver letter.

When you have labeled all your disk drives (which can of course also be partitions on a disk), and are ready to hide the drive letters, follow there steps:

1. Start the Registry Editor. From the Windows Start menu, select Run. In the Run box, type regedit and click OK.
2. In the Registry Editor, locate the following key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
   CurrentVersion\Explorer
3. With the key selected, open the Edit menu, click New and then select DWORD Value.
4. In the name field for the new value, type ShowDriveLettersFirst.
5. Now right-click the new entry, and select Modify in the popup menu.
6. Enter a value of 2 in the edit box, and click OK.
7. Close the Registry Editor. Select Exit from the File menu.

Restart Windows for this change to take effect. After you reboot, your explorer will no longer show the drive letter, just the drive label.

If you prefer a different use fo the driver letters, consider the options for the ShowDriveLettersFirst key:

1: the drive letter is displayed first for remote (network) drives, after for local drives.
2: drive letters are not displayed.
4: the drive letter is displayed first for all drives.