…Clueless

You guys might just kill me for not telling you this earlier but creating special folders is even easier than you think. You might ask how. Well long time back a friendly programmer cooked up a lil’ program that makes creating such folders a one-click affair. Its not a well-known program and quite hard to find. Just head over to this website called Poromenos’ Stuff. Scroll down the page and you will find a link to download a program called Special Folder Creator 1.0.0. Just click on the link and download the 44KB program. Fire it up and easily create your own special folders. (Softpedia link)

But even this little proggy leaves the extension intact in the folder name for everyone to see.

You see anybody who sees your special folder with the crazy extension might get intimidated and won’t dare to touch it. So if you’re quite content with the amount of masking you have achieved then its good. But if you’re just too paranoid and want some additional masking then read on.
Now you’re content and happy but then there’s your nosy lil’ cousin who likes pokin’ around and fiddlin’ with stuff. He might just remove the trailing “}” from the folder name. There you go! Your covers blown! Your folder is just another folder with a wacky name and its content viewable by one and all.

So now you might be thinking I went through all that for nothing!!? Well don’t get disheartened. Where there is a will, there’s a way.

Now if your folder extension is viewable and you’re not satisfied, just create a simple folder as explained in the first step and forget all the steps that follow.

Double click and open that folder you just created. Fire up notepad. Paste the following text in the window as per your selection of the special folder.

• Network Neighborhood / My Network Places :

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}

• Control Panel :

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

• Recycle Bin :

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}

• Printers / Printers and Faxes :

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}

• My Computer :

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

• Dial-Up Networking / Network Connections :

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={992CFFA0-F557-101A-88EC-00DD010CCC48}

After copying and pasting the above text in notepad, save the file as “DESKTOP.INI” inside your folder. I am using the code for Recycle Bin in the example here.

Now that the DESKTOP.INI file has been saved, the major work has been done. The file has basically declared that your folder if of the Recycle Bin type but the changes such as icon change and redirection to the bin will not be reflected as yet. For that, we need to set our folder as a system folder.

Now go one level up, i.e. to the folder in which your would-be special folder resides. Open notepad, paste the following text and save the file as lock.bat in the same directory as your folder. Replace “E:\Folder” with the actual path to your folder.

attrib +s +r +h E:\Folder

Now run the newly saved lock.bat file. It will set the attributes for your folder as Hidden, Read-Only and System. As soon as you run the bat file, you’ll see that your folder just vanished! That’s it! Your folder is hidden now.

Just go to Folder Options from the Tools menu or Control Panel. Click on the View tab. Under “Hidden files and folders“, select Show hidden files and folders. Just a few lines under it, there’s an option called Hide protected operating system files – uncheck it. Click OK. You will see your hidden folder, with the recycle bin icon but without any extension as in the previous case. Yipee!! Double-click on it and it will take you to the recycle bin without exposing the contents.

Viewing the contents of your folder is fairly simple too. Create another BAT file and save it as unlock.bat with the following content.

attrib -s -r -h E:\Folder

This will unhide and unmask your folder and give it its normal appearance back.

That’s it! That’s all there is to it. I know, I’ve written a long tutorial that might have been too boring for you but I did not want to leave out anything.

Now, I’ll tell you the reason for my using the Recycle Bin in this example. You see, Windows creates a system folder called “Recycled” on every partition in your system. So using a folder and naming it as Recycled makes it look kinda authentic to even the smart users (I think).

The following is the content of my lock.bat and unlock.bat files :

• LOCK.BAT :

ren E:\Vault Recycled
attrib +s +r +h E:\Recycled

• UNLOCK.BAT :

attrib -s -r -h E:\Recycled
ren E:\Recycled Vault

Here, I’ve named my folder as “Vault”. Upon execution of the LOCK script, VAULT is renamed to Recycled and hidden. UNLOCK script does just the opposite.

Hope the procedure was easy enough to follow. Keep me posted via comments. Adios!

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