Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Disabling auto play

You might be facing problem with the auto play feature in windows, especially with pen drives (USB Drives). Because unlike CDs, viruses can copy themselves easily into pen drives, so I disabled the autoplay feature. If you want to do the same thing follow these steps.

  • Goto Run dialog box, type regedit and hit enter.
    • be careful when changing registry, because it might corrupt your system if done wrong. You might choose to take backup, so that you can revert back to your previous settings if anything goes wrong.
  • Navigate to the following key
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
    CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
  • Create NoDriveTypeAutoRun key, if it is not there.
  • If it there, set its value as FF, this disables auto play on all drives.
  • If you have to create this key,
    • right click in the right pane, select new > DWORD value
    • name it as 'NoDriveTypeAutoRun', and set its value to FF.
  • Thats it, you have disabled auto play for all drives.
But even after doing this, don't double click on your pen drives. Because by doing so, you will run the viruses in your pen drive if there are any. Always do right click on pen drives and select right click or open in explorer, select pen drive in left pane to open it.

Update: If you don't want to change the registry manually, download Disable_Auto_Play, unzip it to get registry file. Double click on it, it will ask for the confirmation, click on yes. It will add the key to the registry.

See here for more information.

Even you can do this by using group policy editor. Go to Windows > Run > gpEdit.msc
Go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Turn Off Autoplay.
Enable it and select the option "All drives" in the below pane.

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8 comments:

  1. Thanks for the info. Keep the good work.

    ReplyDelete
  2. you dont need to do all that to disable autoplay, there is a simpler way

    Start > Run > gpedit.msc

    Enable : Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Turn Off Autoplay

    double click this and disable on all drives.

    thanks for all the info about removal of amvo virus, i am sure it will be helpful to many. However for those not comfortable with the registry there is a automatic software here

    http://www.en.mygeekside.com/?p=18

    keep up the good work

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you Anonymous for the Information.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you for the amvo.exe removal post. As far as disabling autoplay, you can also use TweakUI (I think you can download from Download.com) and look under My Computer -> Autoplay -> Drives and disable it for the various drives.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I do not have an Explorer folder in the policies folder in regedit.

    Also
    gpedit.msc did not work. I get a message saying "windows cannot find."

    Ideas?

    ReplyDelete
  6. @Anonymous: You have to create Explorer key (or folder). It will not be present already.

    ReplyDelete

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