Hide empty drives?

[teknowledgist]

In Explorer, there is an option to "hide empty drives" which only hides USB drives (not CD/DVD or floppy).  

I have several built-in, rarely-used card readers that I would rather not have to be displayed (especially in the Drivebar) for me to click on trying to find where something is.  This is a real pain when I do have a USB drive plugged in or a memory card inserted and I don't remember which drive maps to which letter.  If only the drives with something in them appeared, what to open would be obvious.

Is this "feature" possible with Xplorer2?  Maybe in the future?

Thanks.

[snakebyte]

You can try this workaround I suggested some time back on a different thread.

It would be great if X2 could automatically do this. Windows Explorer in Win7 has this option.

[kunkel321]

You can try this workaround I suggested some time back on a different thread.
PASTED IN
I use an external card reader with 4 slots and I use only one of them. I was able to remove drive mapping of other three drives which I do not use by following these steps

1. Open Disk management (Right click My computer > Manage > Storage)
2. Right click on the drive which you would like to hide
3. Click "Change drive letter and Path"
4. Select your drive and press remove.

Now this drive will not appear in windows or X2..

This is good to know...  I also have a multi-card gizmo with a bunch of drives I never use--I can never remember which is what...   With your above workaround, Snakebyte, will the drive become visible when I put a card in it, then hidden again when the card is not present??

[snakebyte]

With your above workaround, Snakebyte, will the drive become visible when I put a card in it, then hidden again when the card is not present??

No, it will stay hidden unless you assign a driveletter back to the drive. For this reason, I want X2 to natively support this.

[Cosmo]

You can take a look at USB Drive Letter Manager to find out if it does, what you want.

[kunkel321]

You can take a look at USB Drive Letter Manager to find out if it does, what you want.

USBDLM does look pretty cool...  I don't think it would meet my own needs because more of my superfluous drives are either for different flash cards (at home) or network drives that I can't even access (at work).  I'm going to try Snake's directions, as there are several that I NEVER use.

I will also "second" Snake's nomuniation of this as a feature request for x^2.

[FrizzleFry]

For me, on Windows 7 Home Premium x64, the 5 card drives do not show up on the drive bar until I put cards in them... but if I start x2 with show hidden enabled the card drives do show up in the drive bar.

[kunkel321]

Using Xp at work I was not able to hide the plethora of network drives (it's just as well, the techs at work hate it when I do stuff like that    )

On my Vista at home though, I did Snake's trick and it work nicely.  I got rid of (i.e. removed the letters for) the drives for cards that I don't even own.  Also, I renamed the reader for my Palm Pilot card to drive P and the card for my Fuji camera now goes with drive F  8)   (Was going to make if "drive C" for "Camera" but I figured I'd better not mess with "C." ...

[zamarac85]

xplorer2 would definitely look more attractive for users with card readers, if Hide Empty Drives feature implemented. Some people have a combo floppy & card reader in their PC, plus another one in the printer, so many drive letters are created for no use. They should be auto hidden unless a card is inserted in one, as its done in Win Explorer.

[pschroeter]

This isn't what teknowledgist wants, but TweakUI from Microsoft can hide unused drives from the user. You can still reach a drive by typing its path, they don't show up in x2 or any of the other places drives usually show up. This was handy to hide all those card readers I never use.

Go to:
TweakUI > My Computer > Drives
and uncheck the ones you don't want to see.