Restore "Devices with Removable Storage" in This PC in File Explorer

I was thinking: would it be possible to separate the "Devices and Drives" of W10 back to "Hard Disk Drives" and "Devices with Removable Storage" of W7? Basically what I want to do is split the W10 dropdown so that there's one for HDDs/SSDs and one for (Virtual) Optical Drives/Flash Drives like it was in W7.



Currently, the only way I found to do this is by installing OldNewExplorer and selecting "classical drive grouping in This PC".

I'm not aware of a way to do this directly via any settings in Windows, but there is a third party utility that can supposedly do this (see the link below). Note that the below link references Windows 8.1 but I'm reading plenty of other posts about this utility that indicate that it works on Win 10 as well.

I've not tested this personally so if you do decide to try it, post back and let us know if it worked as expected for you.

How to ungroup and separate removable drives in This PC in Windows 8.1

You might try using Open Shell.

GitHub - Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu: Reborn of Classic Shell.

It makes Windows 10 look like Windows 7.

Compumind said:

Where did you install it? Make folder in a directory and have the .exe point to the .dll, I would think.

Actually you don't need to keep the .exe, the .dll works by itself wherever it is, so I chose to put it inside the Windows folder.

Just keep the folder on the C Drive so you can hook/unhook the Explorer shell when you need to.