Several times a day I receive a message from Avira (my virus and general malware checker) that it has prevented autorun.inf on drive g: (my dedicated rebit 5 external hard drive) from running. What is autorun.inf and should it be allowed to run?
Rebit Support Forum » Troubleshooting
autorun.inf
(2 posts)-
Posted 9 months ago #
-
autorun.infis a text file in the root of a cd or a portable disk, to tell Windows what to do when the media is inserted or when the disk is connected, or when the drive icon is double-clicked. It's also used to populate the drive's context menu (the menu shown when right-clicking the drive; the bolded item is the action performed when double-clicking the drive). More info on Wikipedia.In case of Rebit, I guess it might be running its
Start.exesoftware that is also on that disk. That might check if Rebit is installed, and if so, stop without you actually seeing the Rebit program, or show the setup program if Rebit is not installed. Or, it might very well just be instructing Windows to do totally nothing, like to not prompt the user to browse the disk. (Just guessing here; not on Windows myself.)You can simply open the
autorun.inffile using Notepad to see what Windows is being told to do. That way you can also validate if it's indeed Rebit that created that file, and not some other malware that is trying to infect your disk.So the question is actually: why is Windows looking at that file. Are you disconnecting and reconnecting the drive? Double-clicking the drive? If not, then somehow Windows still feels the disk just got connected, or maybe something is indexing the contents of your backup disk, which seems useless too.
Holding down the Shift key while connecting the drive will disable
autorun.inffor that time. It's also totally safe to block access to the file, or to even delete it. You can always manually double-clickStart.exeif you ever need to install Rebit, or if you need to access your backup from another computer.Posted 9 months ago #
Reply
You must log in to post.