Autorun not working

Hello Rocks,


AutoPlay - Turn On or Off


When a CD/DVD disc is inserted or a USB drive is connected to your system, Windows looks in the root directory of the new disc or drive for a file named autorun.inf. If found, Windows executes the instructions (keys) in that file.

In Windows 7, Vista, and XP, two important changes were made to help improve security:
NOTE: For more on this, see: AutoRun changes in Windows 7 - Security Research & Defense - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

1. AutoPlay will no longer support the AutoRun functionality for non-optical removable media. In other words, AutoPlay will still work for CD/DVDs but it will no longer work for USB drives. For example, if an infected USB drive is inserted on a machine then the AutoRun task will not be displayed. This will block the increasing social engineer threat highlighted in the SIR. The dialogs below highlight the difference that users will see after this change. Before the change, the malware is leveraging AutoRun (box in red) to confuse the user. After the change, AutoRun will no longer work, so the AutoPlay options are safe.
2. A dialog change was done to clarify that the program being executed is running from external media.

By default in Windows 7, Vista, and XP now, the only [Autorun] keys available for USB/removable drives are below. The rest of the keys are ignored.

• label - This key is responsible for displaying a custom name (label) for a CD/DVD or USB drive in Computer when a CD/DVD is inserted or a USB drive is connected.
• icon - This key is responsible for displaying a custom icon for a CD/DVD or USB drive in Computer when a CD/DVD is inserted or a USB drive is connected.

So what your saying is, your computer does not recognize that something has been inserted into the disc trays? That sounds like more than an auto-run issue. I'm going to do some looking around on the net to see if this could be a software issue, but it sounds like a hardware one. Please confirm if I understood your issue or not.

EDIT: After some poking around I came up with a few ideas. Look in device manager and make sure that there are no yellow triangles witn an exclamation mark showing. It probably wouldn't hurt to go ahead and try to update your drivers for your disc drives if you can. Usually in a case like this I say to try cleaning the lense in the disc drive, but sense this is two different drives, this seems like a less likely solution. Someone on another site recommended opening regedit and navigation to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom and verifying that the value for autorun is set to 1, not 0.

This determines whether the system sends a Media Change Notification (MCN) message to the Windows interface when it detects that a CD-ROM is inserted in the drive. The MCN message triggers media-related features, such as Autoplay.
If the MCN message is disabled, the media features that use it do not operate.

Not exactly. Some amount of the trouble has come since installing AnyDVD, it has slowed the process because it first scans the media but eventually the media is shown.

The problem is the drives are configured to ask me what I want done but that never happens. I have gone into Autoplay and for every type of disk I have set the default to "ask me every time" but it never does ask me what I want done with the disk. I insert a disk and after a half minute or so it will appear in my computer but I have to click on the drive to see the contents of the drive or choose what I want done with the disk.

It seems to me it is supposed to work something like...pop a disk in and within a few seconds a menu of choices or at least a message appears to have me select what I want done with the media but nothing happens, I have to manually go to my computer and click on the disk symbol to choose what I want done.

For an application disk I have instructed Autoplay to install the program, but it does not.
Since day 1 of owning W7 popping a disk into either optical drive has not produced any action whatsoever, eventually the disk is "seen" but whats the point of assigning what you want to happen when a disk is popped in if it never does as I have selected it do?

More than a little frustrating.

In that case, the advice I posted above is useless to you. Based on how you worded "it shows the drives but there is no content shown, as if I never loaded the disks" I thought something more serious was going on.

Also, how is this problem "crucial?" I ask because I still can't help but think that there is some part of this that I am not fully understanding.

If you had to run those programs from within Windows, I see no reason why you could not simply navigate to the CD through Explorer. Even if you were having some problem opening explorer via the start menu or task bar Windows key + E also opens a window and (for me at least) takes you directly to the My Computer folder. Also, it was my understanding that the main use for the disc was to be able to boot from it to run the restore program without having to load Windows, but I do not use acronis myself so can't be 100% sure without doing some reading.

I do agree that the problem is weird, because I do not have it on my computer and I understand how frustrating it is to have something so simply not function like it is supposed to. Brink is usually more informed about tweeking these kinds of settings. If he does not reply back soon I will ask him to take another look.