Enable or Disable CD Burning in Windows 7

There are many reasons due to which you would want to disable CD/DVD burning in Windows 7. You can disable CD/DVD burning in Windows so that the optical drive acts like a read only drive and a user cannot write content to a blank optical media. In Windows 7, this can be done using a small setting using group policies. Here is how :

Method 1 :

1. Click on the Start Menu (blue orb in the bottom-left corner), type regedit.exe in the search field and press Enter. Choose Yes, if the User Account Control dialog pops up.

   

2. In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following registry key :
   HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer
3. Right-click in the right-side pane, and select New → DWORD (32-bit Value) as shown. Type in the name of the value as NoCDBurning.

   

4. Double-click on the newly created value NoCDBurning and set the value to 1 to disable CD burning in Windows. If you want to enable CD burning at any later stage, set this value to 0.

   

5. Restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

Method 2 :

1. Click on the Start Menu (blue orb in the bottom-left corner), type gpedit.msc in the search field and press Enter. This would open Group Policy Editor.

   

2. In the Group Policies Editor, navigate to User Configuration → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → Windows Explorer in the left side treeview.

   

3. In the right hand side pane, you will find a value Remove CD Burning features. Double click on it. Choose Enabled to disable CD burning feature. If at any later stage, you want to enable CD burning, you can choose Disabled in the same window.

   

4. Click OK to save the settings and close the dialog.