Hiding Drives GPP

[penfold]

I'm trying to update our Group Policy and want to hide the local drives. I have noticed that GPP allows you to set the drive letter and then Hide the drive. I've set the Action to Update and Drive letter: Existing C but even though the Hide this drive option is selected it still shows when the user logs on.

 

Has anyone done this?

 

The reason behind me looking at this is because we have some software which requires access to the C drive for some rooms and we currently have separate Group Policies using the option to hide\prevent access to drives. I was hoping to merge these into 1 and use GPP & Item level targeting but I'm not sure if this is practical.

[Michael]

You can't do it this way via GPP, but there is a GPO for this -

 

User Config > Admin Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer - Prevent access to drives from My Computer

 

User Config > Admin Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer - Hide these specified drives in My Computer

 

For any mapped drive, your method above is correct. Hope this helps!

[penfold]

Thanks @Michael - that's how we currently do it, I was just hoping that GPP would allow me to merge our 2 policies.

 

if I select the option to Hide all drives this works but if I try to just hide the C drive it doesn't. Not that it makes too much difference, I was just wondering if this would have been a neater way of doing it.

[Michael]

Thanks @Michael - that's how we currently do it, I was just hoping that GPP would allow me to merge our 2 policies.

 

if I select the option to Hide all drives this works but if I try to just hide the C drive it doesn't. Not that it makes too much difference, I was just wondering if this would have been a neater way of doing it.

 

You could argue the GPP and the policy settings I've specified can all be part of a single GPO as a compromise

[Manny-Tech]

I've previously hid drives the following way:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/231289

 

I've never changed to GPP mainly because it still works and I've had no need to change it. Just another option.

[Michael]

I've done it this way too before GPP even existed (showing my age)! These days I would use the GPO for the system drive and GPP for any mapped drive, so in other words D:\ or higher, if there's no optical drive.

[penfold]

Can I just clarify we currently hide drives as suggested, but as you can't target systems we need additional GPO for this as we have some systems (in a different lab) which require access to the C Drive. The reason I was looking at GPP is because you can use item level targeting and I was hoping to use 1 GPO rather than 2. I was just wondering if it could be done via GPP so we have 1 single policy rather than having a separate one just for hiding the C Drive.

[penfold]

Just a quick update as I picked this up again and managed to do what I wanted. What I've done is hide the C drive using the GPO User Config > Admin Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer - Hide these specified drives in My Computer. I've then used GPP to show the C:\ Drive if the computer is in a specific OU. As GPP applies last it allows me to hide the C:\ drive for all machines and then show it for specific OU which then allows me to combine the 2 GPO into 1. Happy days