CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsmacosinstallationusb
Allen Fisher
Allen Fisher

Reputation: 697

Auto Open USB Drive on Mac 10.6/7/8/Windows XP/Vista/7

I'm creating a FAT32 formatted USB Stick/Drive to ship a product. We'd like it to behave a bit more like the hybrid CD/DVD's that we create:

  1. Insert the disk on Mac 10.6 or later and the drive opens up and shows you a window with the application in it. We can do it from a DMG or CD but the USB drive doesn't seem to want to honor the bless command.

  2. On Windows, we've set up an autorun.inf. On XP it's not showing the icon, label, or opening the specified file. I know that you can't have Windows Vista and Windows 7 automatically open something or add an entry to the AutoPlay list by default, but it still should show the Volume Label and icon.

Here is my autorun.inf:

[AutoRun]
Action="Install My Cool App"
Open="InstallThis.exe"
icon="Ultimate.ico"

[Content]
MusicFiles=false
PictureFiles=false
VideoFiles=false

Are these things too much to ask for a USB stick? Anyone else out there shipping things on a USB flash drive and have overcome these issues?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1550

Answers (1)

Alexey Ivanov
Alexey Ivanov

Reputation: 11878

As of Windows 7, AutoRun feature is not supported on USB drives. Only the following commands are supported:

  • label
  • icon

See Improvements to AutoPlay on Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Examples in Autorun.inf Entries do not use quotes for values. Does it work without the quotes?

MacOS might have implemented a similar approach to Windows 7: do not autorun anything from a flash drive automatically to protect you from malware.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions