I am wondering, I have started using the Portable App launcher for a little bit, and I love it however, there is one problem. The program dose not start up apron being pluged into a Windows PC, and the option to run the program is not available, is there anything that I can do to change this??
(Auto play sees the device and asks to run portable App launcher, Or start.exe)
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Launcher on USB device being pluged in to a PC
August 24, 2015 - 8:29pm
#1
Launcher on USB device being pluged in to a PC
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Microsoft removed the ability to auto-run from USB devices years ago. No modern Windows has ever supported the feature and older Windows is patched to remove it. This is due to security reasons since many viruses spread via flash drive.
On your own machine, you can install our Platform autorun utility: https://portableapps.com/node/13770
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Well that is disappointing, I had a Cruiser U3 launchpad thumb drive (by Sandisk) with pocket software from 2005, when the drive was inserted to a computer, in auto play, a list appeared, listing "launch U3 launch pad" witch did the same thing as the portable app launcher. I wanted the USB hard drive to function like that with the pocket apps.
(This may seem irrelevant but this mite put up a solution is some one knows what to do)
How ever, I had Automatic Backup USB hard drive, it had a 350 GB volume and a CD drive inside of the back up drive, containing the backup software, witch when it was pluged in to a pc, "AUTO BACKUP" program would show in the auto run box, is it possible to base the pocket app launcher like the U3 launch pad and back up software??
The old and now dead U3 spec used a specialized hardware drive that showed up as a USB hub, CDROM drive, and USB flash drive. That's how it accomplished autorun. Autorun from CD drives is still allowed. This requires a special controller with support for it that the vast majority of drives don't have. And you have to reprogram it to support it which needs to be done by the manufacturer. In short, you can't do it with software loaded on a drive alone.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
So what you want is for Microsoft to re-introduce a software vulnerability (back-door) that could be widely used by 'hackers' to auto-load malware onto computers. I'm sure that would be an extremely popular feature in the next update to Windows 10.
Not that it will auto launch ( Like it did with the U3 launch pad as described above) but that it would show as a option whenever the drive was inserted to a PC. Auto play would have chooses on what I wanted to do with the drive, ether it was to "copy pictures, documents, move music, ect."
I did some research and I know it is the autorun.inf file that windows uses to work with drives.
(FYI, "I’m sure that will that will be a popular feature in the next windows 10 update" is a good one.)
That's the whole vulnerability. Any app can put any text and any icon it wants into an autorun dialog. Conficker did that specifically making it look like it was the Explore icon.
This point is completely and totally moot as this is not going to happen. Autorun from USB devices is dead and not coming back. You can make any point you like in this forum, but it will do nothing to change Microsoft's years-old final decision.
Fun side note: I came up with what I thought was a better solution back in 2009, but it didn't matter then either: http://johnhaller.com/useful-stuff/windows-7-autoplay
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
That made a lot of sense from the link above. The whole purpose behind this was to make the portable app drive like sandisk's U3 Launchpad drives. Sense the drive is outdated, I looked for alternatives, and found this. I've bought a 1TB wd drive and installed apps on to it. I known from experience how U3 worked and compared it to the launcher.
( despite the custom features of U3 Drive, i did some poking around with the U3 drive, Could i do a CD partition table and put the apps onto it, asuming it is my WD drive? And is the portable app launcher open source?)