How to disable/restrict access to hard drive partitions in Windows 8/RT

Do you want to restrict others from using your specific hard drive partitions? Do some people keep visiting your personal data in hard drive partitions but, you want to stop that? It’s possible now. You can restrict people from accessing your Windows 8 PC’s hard drive partitions.

Restricting access to hard drive partitions is easy but, you need to enable that feature. Microsoft have provided an option to restrict access to partitions of any hard drive and it can be enabled easily in just seconds.

Just follow the instructions below to restrict access to hard drive partitions easily.

Instructions:

First of all, open up the Search charm by pressing ‘Windows key + F’ or swiping from right and then, selecting ‘Search’.

Your Search Charm will open. Here type ‘gpedit.msc’.

You would be showed ‘gpedit’ in results. Press it.

You would be taken to desktop where your ‘Local Group Policy Editor‘ will open.

In ‘File Explorer‘, you would see a lot of settings. Search for ‘Prevent access to drives from My Computer’ and open it.

A pop-up window will open. Here select ‘Enabled‘ from top left and then, the hard drive partitions you want to restrict to, from bottom.

Once you have selected your desired partitions to restrict access to, press ‘Ok’.

Now,go to the ‘Computer’ and try to open the hard drive partitions you restricted access to. You would be showed the message that “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator”.

That’s all! Nobody can access the partitions until you disable the restrictions again.

You may visit our Tips & Tweaks section for more tips, tricks and tweaks about Windows 8.