Complete Solution

How to Create/Add a Shortcut or Hotkey to Eject the CD/DVD Drive in Windows? There’s a number of ways to accomplish this, but the best way is to use the NirCmd utility from the excellent Nirsoft. It does a lot more than just eject the cd-rom drive, so be sure to read the information on their site about all the capabilities.



Create a Shortcut to Eject the CD/DVD Drive



Right clicking by mouse on the desktop screen or somewhere else and select New - Shortcut.







In the location box, put the full path to the nircmd.exe file that you downloaded, and append the “cdrom open” command to the end of it, adjusting the drive letter to match your disc drive:



“C:\path\to\nircmd.exe” cdrom open D:



Note the location of the quotes.. if you are using a path with spaces in it, you need to make sure the quotes are only around the path to the executable, and the arguments should be placed after the quote.







Give the shortcut a meaningful name, like Eject CD or something like that, and you’ll have a new icon (read below on how to use the cd-rom icon as shown)







You can shift the symbol to anywhere you want. Double clicking on it will immediately expel the drive.



Create a Shortcut to Close the CD/DVD Drive



You can follow the same exact instructions as above, but instead of “cdrom open” just substitute “cdrom close”.



Assign a Hotkey to the Shortcut



Now that we have a shortcut, we can assign a hotkey to the shortcut by right-clicking on the icon and choosing Properties. On the Shortcut tab you’ll see a place to assign the Shortcut key:







Put in the shortcut key and shut down the dialog box. As long as the hotkey is on your desktop screen you should not have to reboot anything for the shortcut to work. Also you will be able to shift the shortcut to another folder, for occurrence your quick launch bar.



Assign an Icon to the Shortcut


If you click on the Change Icon button in the properties window, you can give the shortcut a more meaningful icon, perhaps the DVD one you see below.








You will be able to select any symbol on the system that you want, of course.

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