Is there a way to disable autorun for a USB hard drive?

C

Canon

2[H]4U
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Aug 12, 2004
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I know I can disable Auto run for a CD-rom but is there some way to disable autorun for a specific USB hard drive?

I like to use autorun with my USB flash drive etc. just not with the hard drive (the more stuff I get on it, the longer it takes to scan through all the crap when I plug it in).

I am sure I can hold the Shift key when I connect it but that's not what i want.

I found that I can tell it to take no action but the thing is it still scans through all the content of the drive each time you plug it in. It's a 200 gig HDD in the enclosure so that's going to take a looong time eventually.

I'm running Windows XP Professional.

I hope this post is at least somewhat clear. Ask for clarification if neccessary.

Thanks for any input.
 
Try this...

Go to "G" drive or whatever it is, rihgt-click, properties, autorun tab, change it up...
 
Yea, that's what I did. It's actually called Auto play. The trouble is windows still scans the entire drive for what kind of files are on it unless I hold the shift key when I plug it in.
 
I like to use autorun with my USB flash drive etc. just not with the hard drive (the more stuff I get on it, the longer it takes to scan through all the crap when I plug it in).
Click to expand...

you can just hit cancel and it will bring up that box that lets you select what you want to do, like open folder to see files, play files, open photos etc.
 
I want to get rid of that entirely. I won't want anything to popup when I connect my external HDD.
 
Excellent. That did exactly what I wanted it to do. When I plug my flash drive into the system it goes to drive f: instead of e: (even when the HDD isn't plugged in).

I forgot all about Tweak UI. I used to use it a lot with windows 98.
 
I just meant that if he wasn't missing tweakui until now that he could do the registry entry and get along just fine without it for a while longer.
 
rosco said:
You can also disable autorun via the registry.
Click to expand...

Actually, I'm pretty sure that these are two seperate things. I believe this one was officially the "Auto Play" rather than AutoRun or something silly like that. The autorun is primarily for CD-ROMs. Then again, I always turn both of these off the very first thing (even before installing a firewall -- but I keep the [dsl] modem unplugged until I get to the firewall.) Anyway, as he already discovered, TweakUI definitely solves this particular problem. Besides, like he said, TweakUI tweaks the registry settings, it just gives you a nice GUI so you don't have to do it all yourself.)
 
I know tweakui gives you a gui but if you look at that site it gives you a .reg file to download and install. I think you could do that faster than the tweakui program would load.

But....to each his own.
 
Hey, I have found out just recently that if you place an AUTORUN.INF file on the root of the drive, it will not automatically pop up that dialog. That is useful if you want it to not autorun if you place it in someone else's computer or something such as a school/work PC where you can't change the settings. My guess would be that there could be some other things that work specifically for this type of drive (versus the normal CD-ROM options) but if they are documented somewhere, I haven't the foggiest idea where.
 
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