Hide Folders in Windows 7 the Geek Way Using God Mode

You probably have heard about the Windows 7 & Vista easter egg about the God Mode. You take any folder and append the magical string “.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” to the end of the folder name and the folder turns into a special folder from where you can control all settings of your PC.

Today, we’ll see how we can utilize this little feature to hide some desired folders in our PC. Say, we have some important documents in C:\data\important folder that we would like to hide. Browse to C:\data folder and rename the important folder to  “important.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}”

You’ll notice that the icon of the folder changes to a different one. Now try double clicking this icon. You’ll see that you get a settings screen instead of the actual folder contents. Your actual folder contents are now safe from prying eyes.

In order to get the contents back, take a command prompt, cd to C:\data and type ren important.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} important

Here, we are simply renaming the file back to its original name. You don't have to type the entire cryptic folder name. Just enter the first few letters of the folder name and hit the tab key. Command prompt will automatically fill the rest of the folder name.

Apart from the above mentioned string, you can also use the following list of strings appended to your folder names to create different types of God folders.

.{00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33}
.{0142e4d0-fb7a-11dc-ba4a-000ffe7ab428}
.{025A5937-A6BE-4686-A844-36FE4BEC8B6D}
.{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}
.{1206F5F1-0569-412C-8FEC-3204630DFB70}
.{15eae92e-f17a-4431-9f28-805e482dafd4}
.{17cd9488-1228-4b2f-88ce-4298e93e0966}
.{1D2680C9-0E2A-469d-B787-065558BC7D43}
.{1FA9085F-25A2-489B-85D4-86326EEDCD87}
.{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}
.{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
.{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}
.{241D7C96-F8BF-4F85-B01F-E2B043341A4B}
.{4026492F-2F69-46B8-B9BF-5654FC07E423}
.{62D8ED13-C9D0-4CE8-A914-47DD628FB1B0}
.{78F3955E-3B90-4184-BD14-5397C15F1EFC}

There are reports that the God mode crashes Vista running on 64 bit machines. So take care if you fall in this category.

Note: If the data is something that you really don't want to fall into the hands of bad guys, we would suggest you encrypt it using tools like TrueCrypt rather than using this method.