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There are plenty of software which locks drives and folder to protect your confidential data. Why waste money on such tools when you can do it with a simple registry tweak? Here’s how:
Caution: Before you attempt these tweaks, please make sure that you have a backup of your registry, just incase something goes wrong in the middle.
Locking Folders:
- Consider you want to lock a folder named XXXX in your E:\, whose path is E:\XXXX.
- Now open the Notepad and type the following
[code]ren xxxx xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}[/code]
- Where xxxx is your folder name. Save the text file as loc.bat in the same drive.
- Open another new notepad text file and type the following
[code]ren xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} xxxx[/code]
- Save the text file as key.bat in the same drive.
Steps to lock the folder:
- To lock the xxxx folder, simply click the loc.bat and it will transform into control panel icon which is inaccessible.
- To unlock the folder click the key.bat file. Thus the folder will be unlocked and the contents are accessible.
Locking Drives:
We don’t usually prefer to lock our drives, but sometimes it becomes nesscary. Say for instance you might have stored your office documents in D:\ and you don’t want your kids to access it, in such case this technique can be useful for you. Please don’t try this tweak with your root drive (usually C:\ is the root drive) since root drives are not intended to be locked because they are mandatory for the system and application programs.
- Start & Run and type Regedit to open Registry editor
- Browse HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Policies\Explorer
- Create a new DWORD value NoViewOnDrive and set its value as
2^ (Alpha Number of Drive Letter-1) where Alpha number are simple counting of alphabets from A to Z as 1 - 26
For example: to lock C:\, Alpha number of C is 3 so 2^ (3-1) = 4 (decimal value)
- To lock more drives, calculate the value of each drive and then set sum of those numbers as value
- To unlock your drive just delete the key from the registry.
Hat Tip by anilmail17 and wizrulz.
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wrote, on February 5th, 2007
Nice post sankar. Like this we can change it to control panel (the example you gave)….to my computer and other system folders like this….its simply helpful
wrote, on February 5th, 2007
Lock Folders in Windows
Windows has no obvious method to lock folders, even administrators have no obvious way of locking folders. Locking folders could be important if you want to hide certain files or folders to prevent someone else from seeing them or altering the contents…
wrote, on February 5th, 2007
I better would not play with registeries.They really scare me
wrote, on February 5th, 2007
@Ashish Mohta
Oh ! “Practice makes perfect”
back up your register and set for the game…
wrote, on February 5th, 2007
oh thats a useful post .
and like u said going and editing registry is always thrilling.
and “practice makes perfect”.
wrote, on February 6th, 2007
Nice work and it’s really good.
wrote, on February 6th, 2007
It was really helpful. But i want to know how the file or folder can be made undeletable.
wrote, on February 6th, 2007
Sabarish: Did you try Recuva. Its Free!