Home | Resource Guides | Tech Tips | Network Administration | Hardware | Certification

Tech Tips › Windows 2000 Professional › Hardware and Drivers

Tech Tips / Windows 2000 Professional / Hardware and Drivers

Control CD Autorun on a per-drive basis

The registry edit we told you about in "Control CD Autorun globally" disables CD Autorun affects all CD drives. However, you might prefer to disable Autorun only for a specific drive. For example, you might have a CD-ROM and a CD-RW and want to disable Autorun only for the CD-RW drive.

If you want to control Autorun on a per-drive basis, don't change the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom\Autorun value. Instead, leave Autorun set to 1 and edit the Multi String value AutoRunAlwaysDisable from the same branch, adding the device name for the drive for which you want to disable Autorun.

You can find the drive name in the Device Manager. Open the DVD/CD-ROM drives branch, then note the listed name of the drive. If the drive contains multiple spaces or other characters that make it difficult for you to determine the exact device name, configure a text-only printer, then with the DVD/CD-ROM drives branch selected choose View | Print. Print the selected class to a text file, open the text file in Notepad, and copy the device string to the Clipboard.

Next, open Regedt32 and open the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom branch. Select the AutoRunAlwaysDisable value and choose Edit | Multi String. Add the device name to the list and click OK. Close the Registry Editor and restart the system for the change to take effect.

Note: We'll remind you as always to make sure you have a verified backup before editing the registry.