Personalization Add or Remove Duplicate Drives in Navigation Pane of File Explorer in Windows 11

Clairezy · Aug 1, 2023

Hello,

Thank you for all of your solutions that you've contributed. I've tried a combination of them and still cannot seem to remove these drives or find some way around this.

For some reason, I have internal drives that are connected via SATA cables being duplicated on the same level as This PC in the navigation pane. I tried to also add the C drive to the bottom of the navigation pane to see if it was possible to do that and then disable This PC from showing, but it did not work. Any suggestions for this/why this is happening with internal drives?

My C, D, and E drives are all NVMe SSDs. Two of the remaining drives are hard drives and one is a SATA SSD.

Brink · Aug 2, 2023

Clairezy said:
Hello,

Thank you for all of your solutions that you've contributed. I've tried a combination of them and still cannot seem to remove these drives or find some way around this.

For some reason, I have internal drives that are connected via SATA cables being duplicated on the same level as This PC in the navigation pane. I tried to also add the C drive to the bottom of the navigation pane to see if it was possible to do that and then disable This PC from showing, but it did not work. Any suggestions for this/why this is happening with internal drives?

View attachment 66470
My C, D, and E drives are all NVMe SSDs. Two of the remaining drives are hard drives and one is a SATA SSD.

Hello Clairezy, and welcome.

I notice your using a customized File Explorer. It could be an issue cause by the 3rd party UI customization app.

Are these SATA drives connected via hub instead of directly to the motherboard that could be causing them to be treated like a removable drive?

If you have "Show all folders" turned on in the navigation pane, it will show the drives.

slejhamer · Sep 10, 2023

Hello - my first post.

First, thanks very much, Brink, for your great work - I've been a lurker for quite some time and gotten many helpful tips here.

I am having the same issue as Clairezy, with redundancy of fixed drives showing in the left nav pane. Not using a custom File Explorer, and "show all folders" is unchecked (I toggled it on and off to test, but it made no difference.) These are three separate HDDs, not partitions. All are connected via SATA cables directly to the motherboard, not a hub.

Your thoughts would be appreciated! Also pardon the scribble over the virtual Google Drive names.

slejhamer · Sep 10, 2023

Also, system info confirms these are configured as "local fixed disk" drives.

Brink · Sep 10, 2023

slejhamer said:
Hello - my first post.

First, thanks very much, Brink, for your great work - I've been a lurker for quite some time and gotten many helpful tips here.

I am having the same issue as Clairezy, with redundancy of fixed drives showing in the left nav pane. Not using a custom File Explorer, and "show all folders" is unchecked (I toggled it on and off to test, but it made no difference.) These are three separate HDDs, not partitions. All are connected via SATA cables directly to the motherboard, not a hub.

Your thoughts would be appreciated! Also pardon the scribble over the virtual Google Drive names.

Hello, and welcome.

As a test, export the registry key below as a REG file and upload and attach it here. I'll be happy to take a look at it to see if by chance this is the source of the duplicates.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace

slejhamer · Sep 10, 2023

Attached; thanks!

Brink · Sep 10, 2023

slejhamer said:
Attached; thanks!

Your REG files shows entries for "Dropbox" and "Creative Cloud Files".

I see "Dropbox" in your navigation pane, but not sure what "Creative Cloud Files" from Adobe would be.

slejhamer · Sep 11, 2023

Hi Brink, thanks for taking a look at that. I do have Adobe Creative Cloud installed (with a recent version of Lightroom, and an old version of Photoshop).

The Creative Cloud Files folder, which is completely empty, appears in my c:\users\ folder, but not in the nav pane as you noted. I don't recall it ever appearing in the nav pane, but it is possible it was part of a software trial which has been uninstalled. I've found a few web references suggesting Adobe's uninstallers do not completely remove the registry keys when uninstalling Creative Cloud.

Here's a link to one such discussion (hopefully external web linking is allowed here):

How to remove "Creative Cloud Files" from File Explorer address bar

Does any one know how to remove this Creative Cloud Files option after uninstalling Creative Cloud app from Windows 10 Additional info : This folder does not exist as I deleted C:\username\Creative

superuser.com

Also I do see Creative Cloud in the File Explorer address bar drop-down menu - might that be the reference in the REG file I posted?:

I'm a bit hesitant to make changes to the Creative Cloud registry items given that I have the app installed.

Brink · Sep 11, 2023

slejhamer said:
Hi Brink, thanks for taking a look at that. I do have Adobe Creative Cloud installed (with a recent version of Lightroom, and an old version of Photoshop).

The Creative Cloud Files folder, which is completely empty, appears in my c:\users\ folder, but not in the nav pane as you noted. I don't recall it ever appearing in the nav pane, but it is possible it was part of a software trial which has been uninstalled. I've found a few web references suggesting Adobe's uninstallers do not completely remove the registry keys when uninstalling Creative Cloud.

Here's a link to one such discussion (hopefully external web linking is allowed here):

How to remove "Creative Cloud Files" from File Explorer address bar

Does any one know how to remove this Creative Cloud Files option after uninstalling Creative Cloud app from Windows 10 Additional info : This folder does not exist as I deleted C:\username\Creative

superuser.com

Also I do see Creative Cloud in the File Explorer address bar drop-down menu - might that be the reference in the REG file I posted?:

View attachment 70724

I'm a bit hesitant to make changes to the Creative Cloud registry items given that I have the app installed.

Unless you wanted to possibly remove "Creative Cloud Files" from the drop menu, there's no need to remove its registry entries.

slejhamer · Sep 11, 2023

Ok, I must still be suffering from post-Covid brain fog. I had previously attempted to manually make the registry edit shown at the beginning of the thread, and there was no change to the duplicate drives appearing in File Explorer.

Just now I downloaded your REG patch and installed it to see what might happen. Suddenly there are no more redundant drives! I suppose this implies my system was indeed seeing them as external/removable drives, even though the Sys Info showed them as fixed drives. In any case, the problem is solved. Thanks again!

Brink · Sep 12, 2023

slejhamer said:
Ok, I must still be suffering from post-Covid brain fog. I had previously attempted to manually make the registry edit shown at the beginning of the thread, and there was no change to the duplicate drives appearing in File Explorer.

Just now I downloaded your REG patch and installed it to see what might happen. Suddenly there are no more redundant drives! I suppose this implies my system was indeed seeing them as external/removable drives, even though the Sys Info showed them as fixed drives. In any case, the problem is solved. Thanks again!

View attachment 70779