Searching the ‘net brought up a host of utilities (some free, some not) which are designed to extend the AutoPlay functionality, but by far the most useful utility was autorun.exe (a free download from the Tarma Software Research website, not to be confused with Peter Harrison’s AutoRun from the website).

I checked out Microsoft knowledge base articles 155255 but found the PCs were correctly configured to AutoPlay. Once open= is replaced with shellexecute=, the context menu in Windows Explorer recognises index.html as the default action for the device, but for some reason it does not launch when I insert the USB flash drive into either of the PCs I’m using today. Windows 2000 and later recognise the shellexecute command to open other file types, for example: Using this, I soon had a file which changed the icon and name for the USB flash drive when I inserted it, but I could not get it to automatically launch an HTML document.Īfter some searching (most notably a TechRepublic post), I discovered that the open command in autorun.inf only recognises programs. Although autorun.inf files are easy to edit using a standard text editor such as Notepad, the Moon Valley Autorun.inf Editor is a free download from the Moon Valley Software website, which includes a particularly useful feature to locate and display icon resources within a. There is an excellent overview of the autorun.inf file on the Moon Valley Software website. Controlled using a file called autorun.inf, AutoPlay is designed for CDs, but I see no reason why it should not work with other removable media.

I’ve been looking at using the AutoPlay functionality in Windows to launch an HTML document each time I insert a USB flash drive. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time.

Autorun flash drive windows 10