How to Hide or Show Drive Letters in Windows 10


A drive letter is a single alphabetic character A through Z that has been assigned to a physical drive or drive partition in the computer.

This tutorial will show you how to hide or show drive letters in File Explorer for your account in Windows 10.


Contents

  • Option One: To Hide or Show Drive Letters using Folder Options
  • Option Two: To Hide or Show Drive Letters using a BAT file



EXAMPLE: Drive Letters in This PC
Hide or Show Drive Letters in Windows 10-show_drive_letters.jpg Hide or Show Drive Letters in Windows 10-hide_drive_letters.jpg






OPTION ONE

To Hide or Show Drive Letters using Folder Options


1 Open Folder Options.

2 Click/tap on the View tab, check (default) or uncheck Show drive letters in "Advanced settings" for what you want, and click/tap on OK. (see screenshot below)

Hide or Show Drive Letters in Windows 10-show_drive_letters_folder_options.png






OPTION TWO

To Hide or Show Drive Letters using a BAT file


The downloadable .bat files below will modify the DWORD value in the registry key below.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

ShowDriveLettersFirst DWORD

0 = Show drive letters
2 = Hide drive letters


1 Do step 2 (hide) or step 3 (show) below for what you would like to do.


2 To Hide Drive Letters

A) Click/tap on the Download button below to download the BAT file below, and go to step 4 below.

Hide_drive_letters.bat

Download


3 To Show Drive Letters

This is the default setting.

A) Click/tap on the Download button below to download the BAT file below, and go to step 4 below.

Show_drive_letters.bat

Download


4 Save the .bat file to your desktop.

5 Unblock the .bat file.

6 Run the .bat file.

7 You will now notice your screen flicker and a command prompt quickly open and close as the explorer.exe process is restarted to apply the registry changes.

8 When finished, you can delete the downloaded .bat file if you like.


That's it,
Shawn