Why am I being forced to burn a disc?

When I insert a blank DVD-RW, instead of the drive just opening when I double click on it like it used to, now a box with the title Burn a Disc pops up asking me how I want to use the disc, like a USB flash drive or with a CD/DVD player. Why can't I just open the drive like I used to?

 

Open Control Panel > AutoPlay. Scroll down and click the Reset all defaults button at the bottom left.

 

Nope, didn't work. I clicked reset all defaults, save, then inserted the disc again, and double-clicked on the drive. The same Burn a Disc box popped up again.

 

Unless its a readable format, I don't think the drive will open in an Explorer window. If you have it formatted as UDF, it will work that way. Otherwise unformatted and unwritten disks will behave this way.

 

I just tried a CD-RW and got the same message you did. I think it's because it's a blank Re-Writable disc which can be formatted.

 

Well that's really odd. Because, as I said, the drive used to open in an Explorer window and now suddenly it's not. I've never deliberately formatted a disk as UDF, whatever that means. This was just a disc that I used to have some video files on, erased with CDBurnerXP, and now can't open just like I used to.

 

Oh, OK. So then the only times I've opened a disc in Explorer, there were files on it? Well I guess that makes sense. I just could have sworn I'd opened blank discs like that before. But I must have just misremembered. Thanks.

 

That's it!
In Windows XP an Explorer window would have opened. You needed a third-party program like InCD to format a ReWritable CD or DVD. Not so in Windows Vista and later.