I got a question from Thomas this week:

Our office has a licensed copy of Network Administrator 3.0 which allows
me to disable CD/DVD access. Is there an action that will allow me just
disable the CD/DVD burn capability but still allow users to view files
on CD/DVD?

Burn..keep it from burning?

Oops not that kind of burn – Yes excellent question. After a quick search I discovered this is an easy registry change.

If you drill down to this key:

Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Create a DWORD value of NoCDBurning, and set it to 1. Reboot, and the built in burn functionality of Windows is gone.

This works on XP through Windows 7. Now one Gotcha with this is that it does *not* prevent third party apps from burning. You would need to handle this with a separate policy.

If you don’t want to plunk around the registry, we updated Network Administrator to make the change for you:

It is a free download from here and it can push this change to computers remotely.

I was installing the Windows 2003 Resource Kit today, and I ran across these two command line programs that come with it:

cdburn.exe
dvdburn.exe

I started poking around, and I realized they both could be used to burn ISO files from the command line.

For a test, I downloaded a random ISO from MSDN, and gave it a spin:

Sure enough, it burned the ISO to dvd without issue – and actually it seemed faster than most of the GUI programs I have used in the past.

So what do you need to get this to work for yourself?

1. Download and install the Windows 2003 Resource Kit

2. Once you install, go to the command line and get into this folder:

C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools

3. Then, burn your DVD by using DVDBurn.exe, or burn your CD by using CDBurn.exe. Here are the command line options:

DVDBurn.exe {DVD_DRIVE_LETTER} {ISO_FILE_NAME}

CDBurn.exe {CD_DRIVE_LETTER} {ISO_FILE_NAME}

That is all there is to it. Now..what would make this complete is a way to build an ISO from the command line. Anyone know of a free way to do this?