Received a laptop with Windows 7 the other day. My friend complained that earlier when inserting a flash drive or a disk, the Windows explorer automatically opened, but now it doesn’t.
I looked in the control panel - all settings were normal. I thought maybe there were some viruses, anything can happen, but Windows was clean. I noticed that VMWare was installed on the PC, and then I remembered a wonderful key in the registry - NoDriveTypeAutoRun. This key is automatically set during the virtual machine installation.
It is located in the next registry path: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
The NoDriveTypeAutoRun key can has the next values:
0×1 — disabling AutoRun on drives of unknown type;
0×4 — disabling AutoRun on removable drives;
0×8 — disabling AutoRun on fixed drives;
0×10 — disabling AutoRun on network drives;
0×20 — disabling AutoRun on CD-ROM drives;
0×40 — disabling AutoRun on RAM disks;
0×80 — disabling AutoRun on drives of unknown type;
0xFF — disabling AutoRun on all kinds of drives.
In my case it was set to 0xFF. I just deleted this key, and a miracle happened - the autorun started work for needed all drivers.