Autorun.inf Infected Memory Card, USB Drive, Digital Camera or Handycam Memory

Are you not able to open the picture or video folder of memory card? Is that throwing error as “Autorun.exe not found” or something related to Autorun? That means your memory card and computer is infected with Autorun.Inf virus. This problem is very common in memory cards, Digital Camera Memory, Handycams memory etc. Once you will connect these devices with your laptop or desktop and will try to open the folder, either you will see a shortcut of few folders or even not able to open the same. “My Computer” window will show you the size of folder as normal that means it is having the data, but that won’t open. This virus may come to your memory card from other computers those are already infected with viruses.

As the problem of Autorun.inf virus is very common, the solution is also very common. There are few freeware system scanner available for removal of Autorun.inf virus. The most popular one is Autorun Eater. As the name suggest, it removes the Autorun.inf virus so that you will not get the error message while opening the memory card folder or browsing the data inside.

Install Autorun Eater on your computer (Windows PC) and now you can see an “orange” color icon in the system tray i.e. near to the Date-Time section of Windows (bottom-right corner). Now you need to connect your memory card or digital camera or handycam with computer’s USB drive. As the Autorun Eater is enabled for auto-scan, it will scan the USB drive automatically and will prompt you in case finds an Autorun.exe virus. If found, you need to click on the “Remove all” button on the window to remove Autorun.inf virus from the memory card drive.

Once the removal is done, you can go ahead and browse the USB drive folder. If you are able to see the folders and files, fine otherwise you will have to follow the below steps to change the attribute of the folders. Sometimes, Autorun.inf changes the folders and files attributes to make them hidden. Even the “show hidden files and folders” option in “Folder options” also doesn’t work in this case. You will have to change the attribute from Command Prompt.

Change Folder / Files Attribute from Command Prompt

Open Command Prompt by typing “cmd” in the Start search box. On command prompt, type [usb drive]: to go inside that drive. For example, f: to go inside the F drive (in my case the USB drive is F drive). If you are aware about the folder name for that you need to change the attribute, you need to type,

attrib –r –a -s –h *.*

This will change the attribute for each and every folder and files in the drive. If you are well aware about the name of the folder for which you want to change the attributes, you can mention the name as well. For example, I know that the folder named “DICM” is the one that I want back in the drive. I would type,

attrib –r –a –s –h dicm

Now the DICM folder will start appearing in the USB drive and I can browse the data inside that folder. This is how you can get rid of Autorun.inf virus on your computer or the memory cards. From next time onwards, take proper precaution before inserting the memory card in other’s computers as that may get infected again.