Keyboard Shortcuts To Close & Open CD/DVD Tray In Windows 10/11

Most of the personal computers available in the market today don’t include an optical drive, popularly known as a CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive. Now that USB drives and external hard drives are available for throwaway prices, most users prefer using USB drives instead of traditional CDs/DVDs to back up and transfer data.

That said, there are many PCs out there that still include CD/DVD drives. If your notebook has an optical drive and you’re running Windows 10 or Windows 11, you probably have observed that Windows doesn’t provide an option to close the optical drive tray while it does offer the option to eject the drive.

Create a hotkey to close & open the CD/DVD drive tray in Windows 10/11

In short, while you can open the optical drive tray with a click, it’s not possible to close the CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive tray without physically pushing the tray. It could be because neither Microsoft nor developers are interested in optical drives anymore.

Luckily, if you still use CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive in your Windows PC very often, here are two small utilities to help you quickly eject and close the CD/DVD drive tray using keyboard shortcuts.

Door Control

Door Control, as the name might suggest, helps you control the door of the CD/DVD drive right from the desktop. The tool enables you to eject and close CD/DVD/Blu-ray with the help of keyboard shortcuts as well as via system tray shortcuts.

Upon installing and running Door Control, the program sits in the system tray area of the taskbar. To enable keyboard shortcuts for close and eject operations, right-click on Door Control’s tray icon and click Hot Key to open the Door Control Hotkey dialog. Select one of the pre-listed hotkeys and then click the OK button.

Although Door Control is a useful utility, the software doesn’t seem to work with some drives and PCs. While the utility worked on my HP laptop running Windows 10, the program failed to close the Sony DVD drive tray on my assembled desktop PC.

NirCMD

If the Door Control software is not working on your PC, you may try the NirCMD solution from the popular NirSoft.

Step 1: Download the NirCMD utility by clicking here. Extract the NirCMD contents to the root of your Windows 10 drive (the folder that appears when you double-click on the drive icon).

Step 2: Next, open Command Prompt by typing CMD in the Start menu search box and then pressing the Enter key.

Step 3: In the Command Prompt, type cd C:\ and then press the Enter key.

In the above command, replace “C” with the drive letter where Windows 10 is installed.

Step 4: Finally, copy and paste the below commands and press the Enter key after pasting each command to execute.

nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey “~$folder.desktop$” “Open CDROM” “CTRL+SHIFT+O” cdrom open

nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey “~%folder.desktop%” “Close CDROM” “CTRL+SHIFT+C” cdrom close

Step 5: You may close the Command Prompt now. From now on, you can use Ctrl + Shift + O keyboard shortcut to open the CD/DVD tray and Ctrl + Shift + C to close the optical drive tray.

Executing the above commands will create two shortcuts named Open CDROM and Close CDROM on your desktop. You can click on these shortcuts to close or open the CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive tray.