Hide drives with no media BUT ALSO show hidden/system files?

The "Hide empty drives" setting leads to a strange interaction with the "Hidden files and folders" setting. Apparently all it does is setting the "hidden" flag on an empty drive's root folder (since a "drive" is treated as a folder in file explorer), so the visibility of an empty drive becomes dependent on the "Hidden files and folders" setting. I see why MS would choose this lazy implementation, but it leads to annoying and unwanted behavior. In particular, I always want to show hidden files (and "normal" hidden folders), but I don't want empty drives to show up, e.g. virtual drives from a rarely used card reader. Is there some hack to decouple the visibility of empty drives from the setting for normal hidden files and folders?

Co-Pilot gives a very clear answer.

What you’re seeing is actually expected behavior—just not good behavior.

Windows doesn’t have a dedicated mechanism for “hide empty drives” at the shell level. Instead, File Explorer marks the root directory of an empty drive as hidden, and then relies on the global Hidden files and folders setting to decide whether that drive should appear. That’s why the two settings are tied together: the drive only disappears when hidden items are suppressed.This is exactly what you described in your post .

So unfortunately, there’s no built‑in way to decouple the two behaviors. If you always show hidden/system files, Explorer will always show those empty card‑reader slots too.

Workarounds people typically use​

None are perfect, but they may help depending on your setup:

• Disable the unused device entirely If the empty drives come from a USB card reader, you can disable the device in Device Manager. That prevents the phantom drive letters from appearing at all.
• Use a third‑party file manager Tools like Directory Opus or XYplorer have independent logic for hiding empty drives and don’t rely on the hidden attribute trick.
• Assign drive letters only when needed Some multi‑slot readers let you switch to “mount on insertion” mode so Windows doesn’t create drive letters until media is present.

What you can't do​

There’s no registry flag, group policy, or Explorer tweak that forces Windows to hide empty drives while still showing hidden/system files. Explorer’s behavior is hard‑coded, and the OS doesn’t expose a separate visibility rule for empty volumes.

Thanks, Nvidia. I had little hope this could be done with file explorer anyway. Then I have no choice but to ban these card reader drives to a folder mount without drive letters. Given the rare usage, that's much less annoying than having empty drives show up all the time.

glasskuter said:

Co-Pilot gives a very clear answer.

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@glasskuter Do you use Co-Pilot a lot for Windows issues? Have you tried ChatGPT or Claude?