Saturday, October 15, 2011

How to Hide selective drive for XenApp 6 or XenDesktop

There are many ways people go for hiding selective drives and hiding drives. I have tried creating ADM but does not looks to be a viable option .

The "NoDrives" value uses a 32-bit word to define local and network drive visibility for each logical drive in the computer. The lower 26 bits of the 32-bit word correspond to drive letters A through Z. Drives are visible when set to 0 and hidden when set to 1.

There are two registry entry which can make this happen

User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
Value Name: NoDrives
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)

To determine the value, you need to do some little math

The "NoDrives" value uses a 32-bit word to define local and network drive visibility for each logical drive in the computer. The lower 26 bits of the 32-bit word correspond to drive letters A through Z. Drives are visible when set to 0 and hidden when set to 1.

If you are not happy working in Hex, add these decimal numbers to hide the drive(s):

A: 1, B: 2, C: 4, D: 8, E: 16, F: 32, G: 64, H: 128, I: 256, J: 512, K: 1024, L: 2048, M: 4096, N: 8192, O: 16384, P: 32768, Q: 65536, R: 131072, S: 262144, T: 524288, U: 1048576, V: 2097152, W: 4194304, X: 8388608, Y: 16777216, Z: 33554432, ALL: 67108863

For example to hide drive A and drive D, you would add 1 (A) + 8 (D) which means the value should be set to "9".

To disable all the drives set the value to "67108863".

Now say you just want to show H drives to the user and hide rest of them then

All value =67108863 H: = 128 . Just to show H drive =67108863-128=67108735

The value for "NoDrives"= 67108735

To deploy this using GPO you need to do following setting under GPO,

This example is to show all except H: drive on XA box.

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