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Disabling Autorun

taxi97w
taxi97w Posts: 1,526 Forumite
Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker Photogenic
in Techie Stuff
I am thinking of completely disabling autorun so no viruses can initialize from a USB or CD/DVD drive.
Am running Windows 7 and I have disabled autorun only in contol panel, cause I've been thinking I may not be able to run a boot disk or recovery disk even at this stage.
Does anyone know if disabling autorun will prevent a boot disk or recovery disk from working?
more dollar$ than sense

Comments

  • busenbust
    busenbust Posts: 4,782 Forumite
    Does anyone know if disabling autorun will prevent a boot disk or recovery disk from working?

    AFAIK, No, does not prevent the above ;)
  • Ximian
    Ximian Posts: 711 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 500 Posts Combo Breaker
    Disabling autorun is within Windows only, this has no effect on the boot up sequence, which is controlled by the system BIOS. :)
  • JasX
    JasX Posts: 3,996 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    disable autorun in windows (properly, remember you had to edit a group policy in WinXP, unsure fo the win7 equivilent) and disable booting from anything other than your Hard Disk if you want to make certain.... might be worth making note of how to hard reset your BIOS in case you get stuck in future and need to undo the above tho....
  • taxi97w
    taxi97w Posts: 1,526 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker Photogenic
    Ximian wrote: »
    Disabling autorun is within Windows only, this has no effect on the boot up sequence, which is controlled by the system BIOS. :)

    Ah yes, I see it all said the blind man with a guide dog. Cheers.
    more dollar$ than sense
  • -TangleFoot-
    -TangleFoot- Posts: 4,673 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture Combo Breaker
    edited 7 February 2010 at 3:22AM
    taxi97w wrote: »
    I am thinking of completely disabling autorun so no viruses can initialize from a USB or CD/DVD drive.
    Am running Windows 7...
    You shouldn't need to do that with Windows 7.
    In particular, Windows will no longer display the AutoRun task in the AutoPlay dialog for devices that are not removable optical media (CD/DVD.) because there is no way to identify the origin of these entries. Was it put there by the IHV, a person, or a piece of malware? Removing this AutoRun task will block the current propagation method abused by malware and help customers stay protected. People will still be able to access all of the other AutoPlay tasks that are installed on their computer.
    Note: users of older versions of Windows may download and install an optional update which provides similar protection.
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