How to Disable or Turn Off CD or DVD Burning Support and Stop Disc Tray from Auto Eject in Windows 7

Windows 7 like Vista and XP inherits supports disk burning feature. This will come handy when you are not having any 3rd party disk burning software installed. If you are having a CD-DVD burning software like Nero or other similar applications installed then it makes sense in disabling the in-built CD/DVD burning support. This will free up some resource also.

Windows 7 automatically ejects the drive tray when a user double-clicks on the optical drive icon in Windows Explorer or when a user single-clicks on the optical drive icon in the File Save or File Open dialog box if it can’t find any disk inside. There are two ways to disable this built-in feature. First one involves the Group Policy Editor and the second one is a registry hack.

Follow the steps described below to disable burning feature:

  1. Click on Start, then in the Search Box type gpedit.msc and press Enter.
  2. Now in the Group Policy Editor, expand the Local Group PolicyUser ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows Components > Windows Explorer.
  3. In the right pane, double-click on Remove CD Burning features.
  4. Select the Enabled radio button to disable disk burning feature. This will also disable the auto eject disc tray.
  5. Click on OK.
  6. Now, Restart your computer or Log off and then Log on again for the change to take effect.
  7. To revert back to the default settings and re-enable the disk burning feature in, change the radio button setting to Not Configured or Disabled.

This second trick which involves a registry hack will come handy for those folks who are using Windows 7 editions that doesn’t have Group Policy Editor.

  1. Click on Start, then in the Search Box type regedit and press Enter.
  2. Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer
  3. In the right pane double-click on NoCDBurning and assign its value to 1
  4. If the entry NoCDBurning is not their, then right-click on a blank space in the right pane, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value.
  5. Name the new value name as NoCDBurning, and assign its value data to 1.

Alternatively, if you don’t feel easy editing the registry, simply download the DisableOREnable-Burning.zip archive file, which contains two registry files — EnableBurning.reg and DisableBurning.reg. As the name suggests just double-click on DisableBurning.reg to remove disk burning feature and double-click on EnableBurning.reg to restore disk burning feature. Restart or Log off and then Log in for the change to take effective.

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