There are plenty of software which locks drives and folder to protect your confidential data. Why waste money on such tools when you can do it with a simple registry tweak? Here’s how:

Caution: Before you attempt these tweaks, please make sure that you have a backup of your registry, just incase something goes wrong in the middle.
Locking Folders:

* Consider you want to lock a folder named XXXX in your E:\, whose path is E:\XXXX.
* Now open the Notepad and type the following

ren xxxx xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

* Where xxxx is your folder name. Save the text file as loc.bat in the same drive.
* Open another new notepad text file and type the following
ren xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} xxxx

* Save the text file as key.bat in the same drive.

Steps to lock the folder:

* To lock the xxxx folder, simply click the loc.bat and it will transform into control panel icon which is inaccessible.
* To unlock the folder click the key.bat file. Thus the folder will be unlocked and the contents are accessible.

Locking Drives:

We don’t usually prefer to lock our drives, but sometimes it becomes nesscary. Say for instance you might have stored your office documents in D:\ and you don’t want your kids to access it, in such case this technique can be useful for you. Please don’t try this tweak with your root drive (usually C:\ is the root drive) since root drives are not intended to be locked because they are mandatory for the system and application programs.

* Start & Run and type Regedit to open Registry editor
* Browse HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\M*cro$oft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Policies\Explorer
* Create a new DWORD value NoViewOnDrive and set its value as

2^ (Alpha Number of Drive Letter-1) where Alpha number are simple counting of alphabets from A to Z as 1 - 26

For example: to lock C:\, Alpha number of C is 3 so 2^ (3-1) = 4 (decimal value)

* To lock more drives, calculate the value of each drive and then set sum of those numbers as value
* To unlock your drive just delete the key from the
registry.