Diasabling Autorun on DVDR/Hard Drives

[TAFKAT]

Hey All,

Just a quick heads up.

List this under unexplained annoyances and remedies..

I encountered a maddening issue on my office system last night where it started ignoring the autorun settings on the DVDR that I had placed that had worked fine in the past , and would instantly throw up an explorer box after inserting the disk. It was acting very much like virus activity, so I was a little concerned, scanned to no avail, double checked all of the settings , no cigar.

After some poking around , I found an XP patch and the instructions to remedy the issue Here (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967715/)

I am not entirely sure what caused the initial issue, but am happy that the patch returned the behaviour as expected.

Its also a good idea to disable autorun across all drives so that any virus's/trojans that reside on USB memory sticks have absolutely no chance of launching, as any of us here know that have had one sneek under the radar can attest to, they can be an enormous issue.

:009:

[efernan]

Hi,

Yes, this is the new patched and "improved" method to disable autorun. The most common "NoDriveTypeAutorun" registry functionality had a bug, so it didn't always work.

With this new patch of this KB there's a new entry in the registry called "HonorAutorunSetting" that preceeds the "NoDriveTypeAutorun" setting.

Anyway, as said, you depend in a patched Windows to be sure that there's no autorun happening. Another alternative would be to redirect the autorun.inf files to "do nothing". This minimum registry hack is extremely simple and efficient. You don't need any Windows update to make it work.

Just make a file with .reg extension with this:



Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"


Double-click the generated registry data file and that's all!

Cheers!

[TAFKAT]

Hey Efernan,

I actually created and tried that registry hack last night, it didn't work for me unfortunately.

I needed to run the XP Update Patch and set it manually as per the M.S KB article.

Might be worth a shot for others tho that just want to set and forget from the get go...:wink:

BTW: Still have no idea what it was that changed the behaviour of the previous settings in the first place..