How to EJECT AND CLOSE Optical Disk Drive using Custom Shortcut Keys in Windows

The basic way of opening/ejecting an Optical Disk Drive with a tray-loading mechanism is by pressing the front button or by right-clicking the mouse and select “eject” on the drive icon from My Computer/This PC of your system. The physical button allows you to open and closes the tray while right-clicking the mouse doesn't give you the option of closing the ejected tray. This tutorial will show you on how to eject and close Optical Disk Drive using any shortcut keys in Windows.

There are two well-known utilities that give you a much easier way of ejecting and closing Optical Disk Drive using hotkeys, the NirCmd utility from Nirsoft and Door Control from Digola.

You can download any of the two utilities here:

Download NirCmd utility

Download Door Control

For NirCmd utility, here’s how to do it:

After downloading and extracting the NirCmd utility, right-click anywhere on your desktop select “New” and create “Shortcut”:

In the location box, type the path location of the nircmd.exe file that you downloaded within the quotes, and add the command cdrom open at the end of the file path with your drive letter:

“C:\Full File Path\” cdrom open Drive Letter:

For instance, I put the nircmd.exe file in my desktop and my Optical Disk Drive letter path is E:, then I would key in:

“C:\Users\Orionautics\Desktop\nircmd.exe” cdrom open E:

Click NEXT to continue...

Name your shortcut anything you want, like “Eject Disk Drive”, then click finish afterward and you will have your shortcut like this:

Create a shortcut that closes the ejected tray

For creating the CLOSE shortcut, you just have to follow the instructions above and change the command "cdrom open" to "cdrom close"

Change the shortcut icon

You can assign any icon you want on your shortcut by right-clicking on it, select Properties > Shortcut. On the Shortcut tab, select “Change Icon” and choose the icon you want, click OK, then apply:

Assign shortcut key on your created shortcut

After creating the Open and Close shortcuts, you can now assign a shortcut key on it, by right-clicking the shortcut icon, select Properties > Shortcut, on the shortcut tab, key in your desired key on the shortcut key box:

For instance, I am assigning F12 key as the shortcut key on ejecting the tray:

That's it for NirCmd utility.

For Door Control, here’s how to do it:

Simply install the downloaded setupdoorcontrol.exe in your system.

Launch the utility after setup, Door Control will now load on your system tray:

You can now assign any custom shortcut key you want for Ejecting and Closing your Optical Disk Drive by right-clicking the icon on the system tray and select Set Shortcut Key:

It is recommended to check the "Load Door Control at Startup" option of the utility to automatically run on your system every time you boot up your computer.

That's all for the Door Control Utility.

Optical Disk Drive (ODD) is still considered as one of the essential tools of almost all computer machines, no matter what development have been applied to this devices, this piece of hardware is still a part of it. Unlike floppy drives that has gone extinct for sometime now, Optical Disk Drives will go along in every advancements of computers as long as CD/DVD discs exist.