Compact Flash Goes AWOL

By default, when you plugin a compact flash reader Windows XP should spawn a dialog box asking you whether you want to view a folder, launch your media player software, or transfer images to your hard drive using the Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard, or some such. But, lately my CF card reader (which the ebay seller claimed could read 51 different types of card! I only have CF and SD) fails to trigger Autoplay in XP. What to do?

New Media Musings offers lots of discussion on this with a pointer from one comment to the ancient Gateway computers support site. Unfortunately, none of the fixes there took me down the right path and I certainly didn’t fancy doing a full XP reinstall just to get this one trivial function working again.

Thankfully M$ itself came to the rescue on this page, although as usual it took a whole lot of round the house maneuvers to discover that the file I needed isn’t actually on the M$ site but here instead. Anyway, once you’ve got the Autofix Utility kindly do the needful and you will discover your card reader woes are pretty much solved.

This is the log I got after running a repair with the tool on my CF card reader:

AutoFix [V5.2.3790.67]
Time [2007-04-10 20:41:36]
Microsoft Windows Version [5.1 (Service Pack 2) <2600>]

Test [The Shell Hardware Detection service is running.] - Instance [N/A]:
Result [AutoStart Setting]: OK
Result [The Shell Hardware Detection service is running.]: OK

Test [Policies] - Instance [G:\, Drive Type: 2]:
Result [HKCU\...\Policies!NoDrives]: OK {Present}
Result [HKCU\...\Policies!NoDriveAutorun]: OK {Absent}
Result [HKCU\...\Policies!NoDriveTypeAutorun]: Problems {Present}
>> Repair << [HKCU\...\Policies!NoDriveTypeAutorun]
Step: Resetting policy HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer!NoDriveTypeAutorun to 0x000000B1.
Result: This AutoPlay setting was successfully fixed.

>> Required action: The user must log off and log on again

You will no doubt see something similar and after logging off and on will hopefully get the same positive result that I did.