Your flash drive doesn’t open when you double-click on the “drive icon” in Windows Explorer, frustrating isn’t it. Most of us have experienced/experience this problem with our flash drives. Thanks to some of the generous Virus and Trojans on our system, which we “inculcate” into our drives from other systems.
This one became a frequent problem and I had to do something to get rid of it. So here’s a “fix / workaround”. You need to “clean” the flash drive first and cleaning the drive is just half the thing. Because the double click actions are stored in a file inside your flash drive named “autorun.inf”. Now this file is generally not visible, not even if you have your show hidden files setting is enabled. The reason is that it is a system file.
This file will contain the root entries, of what files are to be executed when a double click on the flash drive icon is performed. A normal virus scan doesn’t remove these entries from the autorun file, as applications, under normal conditions, do not have the permission to interact or edit files with system attribute.
Plug in your flash drive. Open the command prompt and change directory to be in the root directory of your flash drive. Now type the following command.
attrib –s –h autorun.inf
Make sure you are in the root/main directory of your flash drive. Now after this command executes. The autorun.inf file should be visible. The contents should be somewhat similar to the one shown below.
[autorun]
open=.\Recycler\AutoLaunch.exe
“The above command governs what the default double click action will be do.”
The following entries are the modified right click entries. These right click entries were hacked to run different Trojan executables.
shell\1=Open
shell\1\Command=.\Recycler\AutoLaunch.exe
shell\2\=Explore
shell\2\Command=.\Recycler\AutoLaunch.exe
shellexecute=.\Recycler\AutoLaunch.exe
Delete all the lines except the first [autorun]. And save the file. Go to the command prompt again and type the following command:
attrib +h +s autorun.inf.
This should help you solve the double click-to-open issues of your flash drive.
And you can also find out where the Trojan executables are residing. For example in the above case the executables can be found inside Recycler folder, again another hidden folder.
Thats something I’ll add to my list Paolo 🙂 .. Thumbs up for u :).
/G
I had a similar problem with a cn911.exe file that was once on my flash drive. Removing the entries in the file worked, though adding a -r into the attrib command removed the whole read-only problem I had. Thanks!
Hey Alto. The entries in your autorun is not necessarily what I’ve published. The general autorun problems are caused by these entries. And I’m positive that the autorun command is controlled by the autorun.inf file.
I could use more details on your problem. Seems to be not so generic. 🙂
Hope to see you back.
@ alto :
Currently, I’m away from my system at home. I’ll publish a solution asap, or atleast try to figure out a solution for your prob. Let me know if you have any more specific issues.
This tips does’nt work. Please if you have some more removal solution on the following autorun command do post it soon. Thank you.
open=.\Recycler\AutoLaunch.exe
shell\1=Open
shell\1\Command=.\Recycler\AutoLaunch.exe
shell\2\=Explore
shell\2\Command=.\Recycler\AutoLaunch.exe
shellexecute=.\Recycler\AutoLaunch.exe