Hide Drives on Domain Computers Windows – Server 2012

Nowadays data security and protection is becoming one of the major concerns for all the organizations as every organization wants that their work data should be secured and not accessible outside the organization.

Organizations provide desktop and laptop to the work employees and most of them need to work on one or more applications to complete their tasks so there is a way that we can hide the drives for the employees which will restrict them to save any data from the drives and take it Home with them.

In this article, we will use Windows servers 2012 R2, Active Directory, Group Policy Management, and the client computer to deploy, install and test its working.

We will hide the drives using group policy so open GPM and Active directory one by one. First, we will choose the OU where we have those users whom we want them to restrict the drives as in this case, it is “Sales Dept”.

Now open group policy management and browse to “Sales Dept”.

Right-click on it and select the first option.

In New GPO window enter the name as in this case I have named it as “Drives Restriction”.

Press Ok and right click on newly created to select the “Edit” option.

In GPM editor browse to the “File Explorer” and you can find file explorer in user configuration à Policies à Administrative Template à Windows Components à File Explorer.

Now look for “Hide these specified drives in My Computer”

Double click on it and it will open console for this policy.

Enable it and go to the “Pick one of the following combinations” and select “Restrict all drives”.

Click on Apply and press Ok. Now you can see your policy is enabled.

Login to the client computer using any of credential sets which are in the OU where we have enabled the group policy. I have logged in with “usera”.

Go to My Computer and check whether drives are still showing or not if they are still showing just as shown in the below-mentioned figure then you don’t have to get worried about that group policy will be enabled once user logged off from the computer and tries to login back or by manually updating the policy using command prompt window.

I have logged off from the computer and logged in back to the computer. Now go to My Computer and you will see there is no drive available.

After this tutorial, you should be able to know how you can hide drives on domain computers.