Enabling and Disabling AutoRun in windows explorer

I use an external hard drive on my Windows XP box at home. What bothers me is that everytime I turn my hard disk on, the Explorer Shell starts its autoplay dialog. It scans the drive to determine the type content on the drive  (audio, video etc) and suggesting corresponding programs to open the content on drive (windows media player for audio, video etc).

I had been trying to find a way to turn this feature off, since I really dont want to autplay it. A quick search on msdn revealed this article which mentions how autorun can be disabled. All I needed to do is to go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\ and add a new binary value NoDriveAutoRun with a bit mask to specify the drives which i want disabled from AutoRun. So first bit set implied drive A would be disabled, second bit for B:, so and so forth. For my case I had to disable E, F, G, and H, so i put a bit mask of 0xF0. Autorun was diabled!! - Wohoo!.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 26, 2007
  That's cool. I really is annoying. Especially when the external drive is huge and insists in being autoplayed. Remember the times when you click 'cancel' 100 times before it all stops. But Nikhil dear! What seems to straightforward to you may just freak out a non-techie. Imagine your housewife neighbour opening the registry editor on your computer and tuning it. tragedy

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2008
  The link in the article has changed and is now out of date.

• Anonymous
  August 03, 2008
  You can always send your wife a reg file! I personally set mine to 0xff for added security :)