How do I hide the System Reserved partition?

How do I hide the System Reserved partition from the Windows Explorer?

On the above screenshot, I want to get rid of System Reserved (D:). How do I do that?

I will never need to access it from there, why would I need the entry then?

PS: I want to hide it, not delete it.

Solution 1:

Remove the drive letter for the system reserved partition. If you have a multi-boot system, this could cause problems depending on where your system boots from.

To remove the drive letter and hide the partition from explorer and my computer:

1. Open Computer management on the local computer by right clicking on Computer in Windows Explorer and choose manage. Then click on Disk Management in the left hand pane.

   (Or just type diskmgmt.msc into the run dialog)

2. Right click on the shaded area for Drive D: System reserved in the lower right hand window.

3. Click on Change drive letter or paths

4. Highlight D and click remove

If you receive error messages that the drive might be in use or that programs might not run correctly, don't panic. It is OK to remove the drive letter. Once a letter is not assigned, the drive will not appear in windows explorer.

This works in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.

Solution 2:

I encountered the same issue. In DiskMgmt GUI no drive letter was assigned to the hidden system partition but in Windows Explorer it had drive letter H:

I solved it as following: In a command prompt I started DiskPart.exe, then ran:

list disk
select Disk 0
list partition
select partition 1 (the one corresponding with the hidden system drive)
remove

Now the drive letter is gone in the Explorer.

Solution 3:

In some cases - as seen in this question - removing the drive letter for the System Reserved partition can cause other partitions on that drive to not show up in Windows Explorer. To avoid that, a registry tweak must be used to maintain the drive letter but hide the drive.

Open the Registry Editor (type regedit in the Run dialog) and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer, creating the Explorer key if necessary. Create a new DWORD value called NoDrives. The data for that value should be a bitmask with set bits indicating a hidden drive. To hide only the A drive, set the data to 1. To hide the B drive, set the data to 2 in decimal (10 in binary) - the second bit corresponds to the B drive. Similarly, 9 would hide the D and A drives (it's 1001 in binary).

A logoff/logon cycle may be required for this change to take effect.