Comments on: Ask The Readers: Lock A DVD Drive In Windows Explorer

By: Invalid Partition Table: Recovered! | Blog Curhatan

Invalid Partition Table: Recovered! | Blog Curhatan — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:37:43 +0000

[...] Ask The Readers: Lock A DVD Drive In Windows Explorer (ghacks.net) [...]

By: Q

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:40:18 +0000

I believe that disabling AutoRun (or Autoplay) would be necessary to skip reading from the optical drives.

This means that Windows Explorer would not automatically read from the drives. This also means that the Explorer shell will not automatically update the icon nor label shown for the drive.

To disable autorun of the optical drives on Windows 2000/XP:

Windows policies like NoDriveTypeAutoRun exist that may disable autorun for optical drives. The NoDriveTypeAutoRun is described:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/regentry/93502.mspx?mfr=true
A Local Machine version of the policy may also exist.

Also, a seeting for the cdrom.sys driver may disable autorun. The Registry DWORD value “Autorun” may be set to 0 at the following to disable autorun at the cdrom.sys driver level:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom]

Do not forget to reboot.

By: chul

chul — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:31:08 +0000

Microsoft has a command line utility called DevCon to control devices from the command line or by batch file. Download it from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272.

To disable all CD/DVD drives, you would use:

devcon disable gencdrom

And then to reenable them:

devcon enable gencdrom

But that will also affect many virtual CD drives, depending on which virtual CD software you use. To avoid that, you have to find your physical CD/DVD drive’s hardware ID in Device Manager and use that as the argument for the devcon enable/disable command. You can use asterisks to match partial names; for example, “matshita*” will match all Matshita drives.

By: RogueSpear

RogueSpear — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:11:26 +0000

This problem is exactly why the first thing I do with new media is to make an .iso file. Especially with my laptop. All that spinning up and down for no reason tends to half battery time.

By: garbanzo

garbanzo — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:23:19 +0000

well, you can prevent access entirely in gpedit.msc, or you can simply disable the drive in device manager, but both require half a minute’s work to enable the drive again when you want to use it…

i also found this:

“you can use Nero DriveSpeed to lower the max speed of the drive(s) which will reduce the time it takes them to spin up and read the label name”

By: Thinker

Thinker — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:09:54 +0000

I don’t know how to disable it, but you can set your dvd to silent mode, look at this:
http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-365-how-to-prevent-the-cd-drive-from-making-too-much-noise