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On Windows 7.

I have a lot of hard drives which are used for storage.

When launching certain programs (e.g. some games, Photoshop, etc.) the program will automatically try to query/access all of the system's drives for whatever reason (presumably to enumerate them, see how much free space is on them, or access some other property of them).

This means that every time I launch these programs all of my drives have to (slowly!) spin-up even though no files on the drive are actually being used.

This is extremely annoying.

So is there a way I can restrict access to these hard drives, and/or make them invisible to certain programs?

WackGet
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  • it would be not available to set hard drives invisiable for specify apps, but we could configure specify apps not right to access file system to access files, photos, document or images and so on, we could read https://www.thewindowsclub.com/access-to-file-system-in-windows-10 – JoyQiao Sep 19 '18 at 08:55
  • @WackGet may I ask why you put a bounty on a [different question](https://superuser.com/questions/677114/deny-application-access-to-hard-drive-or-volume-in-windows-7) and not on yours and why so much? – Albin Sep 25 '18 at 22:35

1 Answers1

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If you only sometimes use these drives for accessing the contents, go ahead and unmount the volume.

You can use disk management to delete the drive letter for the volume, stopping programs from finding or referencing it. You can mount the drive again later as needed.

This also prevents you from working with those files, or anything else.

Here is a tutorial.

Tutorial

manbearpig
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  • You could create a new user, and hide access to those drives from the user. https://superuser.com/q/238235/787709 then run the programs as that user – Patrick Sep 18 '18 at 04:33