How to autorun poratble apps suite on my portable hard drive.

Published on June 24, 2008 By CharlesCS In Personal Computing

OK, so I have this 250 GB Western Digital Passport portable hard drive that I replaced my Sandisk Cruser 4 GB memory stick with. My memory stick has the U3 software allowing me to carry portable software I can not install on my job PC. I like using Firefox and all its featured compared to IE6.

Here's my problem. I installed the Portable Apps Suite onto my WD portable drive since it basically works just like the U3 software on my Sandisk Cruser. I did this cause my drive was 250 GB compared to the 4 GBs the memory stick has so I can carry my entire collection of music to listen to at work, some video files I get from emails and some software in case I need to fix someones PC. While the size of the drive can not compare to the size of the memory stick, I don't have an issue with that. I'm fine carrying this drive in my pocket. What I would like to do with the drive is be able to have the Portable Apps Suite autorun upon connecting it thru the USB of the PC like the U3 software does. Now I know the U3 software has a cd drive like programs that allows the U3 software to aurorun and was wondering is anyone has any suggestions as to how to autorun the .EXE file for the Portable Apps Suite. The .EXE file is inside a folder and the WD drive comes with an aurorun.ini file to run the sync software that came with the drive. Can I modify that file to autorun the .EXE file from inside a folder in the portable drive? And if so, will it autorun every time I connect the drive?

Please help. Thank you.

Comments

CobraA1

on Jun 24, 2008

Can I modify that file to autorun the .EXE file from inside a folder in the portable drive?

Yes. I believe it is autorun.inf, and Wikipedia has an article about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorun

CharlesCS

on Jun 25, 2008

You are correct. I missed the .inf part. Thank you. I looked at the wiki site but could not find anything that could show me how to do it. It actually spoke more about how to disable it and a Linux program to do it. Not sure if I could use that. Thank you though.

ShelbyGT_The_Car

on Jun 25, 2008

To use the HD as you want edit the .inf file with Notepad and be sure it says this here...

[Autorun]
Open=PortableApps\PortableAppsMenu\PortableAppsMenu.exe
Action=Start PortableApps.com
Icon=PortableApps\PortableAppsMenu\PortableAppsMenu.exe
Label=PortableApps

then your files should look as this up front

That may help I hope!

ShelbyGT_The_Car

on Jun 25, 2008

My portable applications works fine on any environment as seen here

CharlesCS

on Jun 25, 2008

Thanks Shelby (cool name BTW). I'll let you know of the results in a few.

CharlesCS

on Jun 25, 2008

Ha, funny how things work on your job PC. Because my privileges on my work PC are very limited, I have issues with mt portable drive that are stopping Shelby's suggestion from working. I use to have the Sandisk Cruser connected to this PC before and Windows assigned 2 drive letters to that memory stick which will not allow the WD drive to use. Instead either the drive does not show on My Computer due to no drive letters available or I am forced to attach the drive before I log in to the PC and it will then take over the drive letter of one of the network drives. I figure due to this and the error message I get stating the network drive mapping is not working, it won't let the autorun file run properly. Will test it at home to see if I did it right though.

I did, however find the perfect solution for my job problem. Talk about the easiest solution. I simply added a shortcut to the startup folder and that solved my problem of autoruning the Portable Apps from my portable drive. Thanks for all the help though. I will let you know if it works at home this afternoon.

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