Recently I had a problem where when I inserted a new CD/DVD into one of my drives it would show the files in the right hand pane of Explorer but not the volume name on the left hand side of Explorer. And if it did show the volume name, usually after a reboot with the CD/DVD still in the drive, it wouldn’t remove the volume name after I ejected the CD/DVD. Even when I inserted a totally different CD/DVD the volume name from the old disc would still show in Explorer even though the files that showed in the right hand pane were from the new disc that had just been inserted. This was driving me crazy to no end and when I searched for a solution I realized that a lot of other people were having the same problem. Just about everywhere I looked people made reference to either the Windows XP Autorun setting or the Auto Insert Notification setting. Now in just about every case it seems that people didn’t know the difference between the two settings because in just about all instances the item they described how to enable or disable was the Windows XP Autorun feature even though most referred to it as Auto Insert Notification. Now in the old days of Windows 9x you could enable or disable Auto Insert Notification by simply removing or replacing the checkmark in Device Manager for the drive in question but in Windows XP its not that easy. So here is the solution I found and hopefully it helps out a few other people as well.
First of all you need to open Windows Registry Editor (regedit). To do this go to the RUN command and enter “regedit” and then press ENTER. Then browse down through the following key path.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Software
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Policies
Explorer
Now look at the “NoDriveTypeAutoRun” key on the right. To enable Auto Insert Notification, right-click on that key, select Modify and change the value to 0000 95 00 00 00 and click OK. Now quit the Registry Editor and restart Windows for this to take effect.
For those of you that don’t feel comfortable messing around with their registry I have uploaded a .reg file in a ZIP that will automatically make the necessary changes, all you have to do is download the ZIP file and open it in your favorite ZIP file handler (ie. WinZip, WinRAR, WinACE) and double click on the windows_autorun.reg file inside. Then restart Windows for the changes to take effect.
Thats it, your drives should now refresh their content automatically when a CD/DVD is inserted or ejected from the drive.
Your welcome.
PS - This has only been tested to work safely on Windows XP so I take no responsibility for what could happen to your system if you try this on any other version of a Microsoft operating system.