Hide Mapped Drives from End Users

[Yeimi]

I work for a company running Windows 2000 SBS with an additional NT4
Server that houses a legacy database. All workstations run Windows XP
Professional. In order for the database to work properly, all users
must have drives F: and V: mapped to certain folders on the NT4
Server. A logon script on the 2K server automatically maps these
drives for users.

Employees has no reason to access anything on these drives manually,
and because NT4 is rather lacking in security, I want to prevent users
from seeing these 2 drives in My Computer and Windows Explorer. I did
some searching and found 2 recommendations:

-Use Group Policy to hide the drives
-Use TweakUI to hide the drives

Neither of these solutions appear relevant to my situation. The Group
Policy only allows you to hide specific drives (I think it was A-D).
TweakUI is user dependant, so if I hide the drives while logged in as
the admin, they still appear when a different user logs in. A user
with restricted permissions cannot access to necessary features of
TweakUI, so I cannot log in as the employee and hide it for them.

Do I have any other options?

Thanks,
Jen Ricklin

 

[Steven L Umbach]

I have not tried this myself, but if you read the KB link below you can modify the
system.adm file [ backup it first! ] to suit your needs for hiding drives using Group
Policy. --- Steve

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;231289

 

[Steve Carr]

yes, this works very well, it is an easy text edit of the adm file plus
learning their values method for each drive letter so you can assign the
right number to the added policy. After that it is a snap.
One caveat however:
even though it is invisible in Explorer, it is still there so if a user goes
into, say, Word and goes to Open a Doc and in the file name they type f:\
and hit enter, it will show them the drive. So, the curious user will
probably still find it. Otherwise it is nice to hide what is behind the
curtain.

I have not tried this myself, but if you read the KB link below you can modify the
system.adm file [ backup it first! ] to suit your needs for hiding drives using Group
Policy. --- Steve

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;231289

I work for a company running Windows 2000 SBS with an additional NT4
Server that houses a legacy database. All workstations run Windows XP
Professional. In order for the database to work properly, all users
must have drives F: and V: mapped to certain folders on the NT4
Server. A logon script on the 2K server automatically maps these
drives for users.

Employees has no reason to access anything on these drives manually,
and because NT4 is rather lacking in security, I want to prevent users
from seeing these 2 drives in My Computer and Windows Explorer. I did
some searching and found 2 recommendations:

-Use Group Policy to hide the drives
-Use TweakUI to hide the drives

Neither of these solutions appear relevant to my situation. The Group
Policy only allows you to hide specific drives (I think it was A-D).
TweakUI is user dependant, so if I hide the drives while logged in as
the admin, they still appear when a different user logs in. A user
with restricted permissions cannot access to necessary features of
TweakUI, so I cannot log in as the employee and hide it for them.

Do I have any other options?

Thanks,
Jen Ricklin

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Glad you got it working and thanks for reporting back your results. Yes if you read
the explanation of the setting it says it will only hide the drives in My Computer
and Windows Explorer which is still worth something. --- Steve

yes, this works very well, it is an easy text edit of the adm file plus
learning their values method for each drive letter so you can assign the
right number to the added policy. After that it is a snap.
One caveat however:
even though it is invisible in Explorer, it is still there so if a user goes
into, say, Word and goes to Open a Doc and in the file name they type f:\
and hit enter, it will show them the drive. So, the curious user will
probably still find it. Otherwise it is nice to hide what is behind the
curtain.

I have not tried this myself, but if you read the KB link below you can modify the
system.adm file [ backup it first! ] to suit your needs for hiding drives using Group
Policy. --- Steve

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;231289

I work for a company running Windows 2000 SBS with an additional NT4
Server that houses a legacy database. All workstations run Windows XP
Professional. In order for the database to work properly, all users
must have drives F: and V: mapped to certain folders on the NT4
Server. A logon script on the 2K server automatically maps these
drives for users.

Employees has no reason to access anything on these drives manually,
and because NT4 is rather lacking in security, I want to prevent users
from seeing these 2 drives in My Computer and Windows Explorer. I did
some searching and found 2 recommendations:

-Use Group Policy to hide the drives
-Use TweakUI to hide the drives

Neither of these solutions appear relevant to my situation. The Group
Policy only allows you to hide specific drives (I think it was A-D).
TweakUI is user dependant, so if I hide the drives while logged in as
the admin, they still appear when a different user logs in. A user
with restricted permissions cannot access to necessary features of
TweakUI, so I cannot log in as the employee and hide it for them.

Do I have any other options?

Thanks,
Jen Ricklin

 

[Torgeir Bakken \(MVP\)]

yes, this works very well, it is an easy text edit of the adm file plus
learning their values method for each drive letter so you can assign the
right number to the added policy. After that it is a snap.
One caveat however:
even though it is invisible in Explorer, it is still there so if a user goes
into, say, Word and goes to Open a Doc and in the file name they type f:\
and hit enter, it will show them the drive. So, the curious user will
probably still find it. Otherwise it is nice to hide what is behind the
curtain.

Hi

Then you can use this one::

Prevent Access to the Contents of Selected Drives
http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/1157/

It is the same as this Group Policy setting:

Prevent access to drives from My Computer
(User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows
Explorer)

GPO reference:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/gp/340.asp

 

[Steve Carr]

yes, you can prevent access but in this case they need access to use the
databases, Yeimi just didn't want people going to the drives through
Explorer so all you can do is hide them which isn't actually preventing
access, it just makes it harder to find.