Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

How do I change the default action with removable media on my PC?

I'm constantly inserting and removing a PCMCIA card with a digital camera's SD card from my laptop. It becomes E: drive when installed.

Whenever I install the card, though, Windows XP prompts me to indicate what I want to do with the card. It has audio, video and pictures on it and I always want to do nothing. How can I tell XP to never try to autoplay anything on this or any card?

Dave's Answer:

This certainly sounds like an annoying situation, but I'm a bit confused because when you get the window that asks what you want to do with the new PCMCIA device, you should also have a checkbox on that window that allows you to specify whatever option you select as the default action in the future.

If that doesn't work, or for some reason that window doesn't include the default setting option, there's another route to this option. This'll require that you have the card installed. Once you do have it appear on your desktop, right-click on the E: drive, select Properties, and then click on the Autoplay tab.

Choose "Select An Answer To Perform" then you can set the default action for this particular device. I'm guessing you want "Take No Action", somehow.

By the way, a colleague of mine told me that he had a similar problem on a CD drive of his own a while back and it took him several tries to successfully change the default action. This should do the trick for you, however, hopefully on the first try.

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Stumble Upon

Categorized: Windows Help (Article 3853)
Tagged:
Previous: What makes a good publishing contract for a writer?
Next: How do I change my default shell in Mac OS X Panther from tcsh to bash?

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

I had exactly the same problem (Autoplay kicking in whenever I connected my Firewire drive). This must be a part of "undocumented Windows," because it took me a while to piece together the solution. Here is what worked for me:

* Open your registry by selecting Start, then Run, then entering regedit /v as the command

NOTE: Changing registry values can make your PC unbootable, so be very careful what you change!

* Select the topmost node ("My Computer") in the registry hierarchy.

* Search (ctrl-F) for the following value: NoDriveTypeAutoRun

* Each time you find the NoDriveTypeAutoRun value, note the registry path that leads to it, and its original value. On my PC, the value for these was always 0x91.

* Then, whatever that value is, change it to 0xdd. That should turn off autoplay for everything *but* your CD drives. To turn it off for everything, use 0xff.

* Repeat the above for all remaining occurrences of NoDriveTypeAutoRun throughout your registry. Be sure to note each original value and the path to it, in case you want to restore it later.

* Close the registry and re-boot your PC. These registry values will not take effect until AFTER you have rebooted.

* After rebooting, to test the success of the procedure, try detaching your firewire drive (using the usual safe removal process, of course) and then re-attaching it. Autoplay now should not occur when you re-attach the drive.

Finally if you want to know the meaning of the DD and FF values, or how to disable or enable autoplay for other devices, see the following URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/2000/server/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/2000/server/reskit/en-us/regentry/91525.asp

That document is for Windows 2000; I could not find a similar document for XP. However, so far as I have tested (which is just turning off my firewire drive), these values work for the NoDriveTypeAutoRun values of the XP registry (although the registry paths are different).

Remember, I have just figured this out on my one machine, and what worked for me may not work for you! So proceed with caution, but this definitely did it for me.

Goalstate
---

Posted by: Goalstate at February 8, 2005 5:12 AM

Splendid additional comment. Thanks for the great details!

Posted by: Dave Taylor at February 8, 2005 5:14 AM

By the way, in my case the checkbox to make my selection the default was not present, and when I tried to select no action for each media type, it promptly forgot the settings I had specified. So, the above was the *only* thing that worked for me.

Goalstate
---

Posted by: Goalstate at February 8, 2005 5:16 AM

thanks for the info, it's V useful, but can you tell me how to change an outlook attachment default once the checkbox has been ticked? I want to stop a PC from automatically opening attachments if the attachment is double-clicked, and return it to prompt for response.
(thanks in advance, dee)

Posted by: Dee at April 19, 2007 7:28 AM

There is an extra piece to the pudding. If you open Windows Explorer and left-click on a CD/DVD drive in the RH pane, the default action is "Install or run program". If you disable autoplay for CD/DVD drives then you definitely would want to change/remove that as well.

I believe there is a registry key for that too but have been unable to find it at this point in time.

Posted by: SamC at June 25, 2008 10:41 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!