I am not as technically adept as most of the people posting here. The last time I actually programmed anything was when Z-80s and 6502s were considered state of the art. So, be patient with my questions. When I stick a U3 USB drive into a computer, the U3 Menu automatically loads and is in the bar at the bottom of my screen. When I stick in my USB with PortableApps in my computer, the icon for USB changes, but the menu does not automatically load. Is this due to some setting on my computer for how it processes the autorun.inf file? I thought that the autorun.inf file that is in the PortableApps installation would automatically start the menu.
What is supposed to happen when you insert a USB device with the PortableApps autorun.inf file?
Thanks in advance for any help!
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This has to do with the way U3 is set up. I can't help you beyond that since I've never even used a U3 device.
Vintage!
I don't think the autorun.ini is processed differently. Are you sure you didn't click anywhere and this action makes the menu disappear very soon after it appeared?
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
U3 uses a partition to emulate a CD disk drive and this allows it to start the menu. The way removable drive autostarts work is it pops up that window asking you what you want to do. The autostart.inf allows that window to have the menu entry on top so you can just click OK to start the menu.
When I stick my USB drive with PortableApps into my computer, all it does is change the icon for that drive. It does NOT load up the menu. I thought the autorun.inf file was supposed to do that. How come it is not working that way?
Basically Windows is not setup to run anything automatically off of an external drive. The exception is XP SP2, where it should work on some level by default. U3 manages to autorun it's menu by tricking Windows. As was already mentioned, U3 drives have a 5MB cd partition with an autorun. The difference is Windows will automatically process cd autorun's by default, but not those on portable ums drives.
Is popup a menu with choices, like:
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Run with Whatever
Open Drive with Windows Media Player
Browse Drive
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If it's not doing this, something is stuffed up.
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Ryan McCue
Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
(Tom Lehrer)
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
Are you all saying that to run PortableApps programs from a portable device, you always have to manually run the program StartPortableApps.exe first?
Another strange thing that happened is that I loaded and installed the PortableApps suite to a directory on my laptop's hard drive, but OpenOffice writer would not work. It said that some file was missing. I then installed the suite to my Sandisk MP3 player, and it worked perfectly.
Why wouldn't it work on my laptop's hard drive?
Open up your USB, browse into the PortableApps folder, viola!
Hmm, weird. What file exactly?
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Ryan McCue
Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
(Tom Lehrer)
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
Configuration data in
'file:///C:/Documents%20and%settings/Preston/My%20Documents/PortableApps/PortableApps/OpenOffice/App/openoffice/share/uno_packages/cache/registry/com.sun.start/comp.deploymnet.configuration/PackageRegistryBackend/registry/data/org/openoffice/Office/ProtocolHandler.xcu' is corrupted. Without this data some function may not operate correctly. Do you want to continue startup of OpenOffice.org with the corrupted configuration data?
When I click on Yes, it cycles through and get me back to that same pop up window.
What is going wrong? Why doesn't it run from my internal hard drive?
See my post in relation to your other comment. And please don't post the same issue in multiple places (it gets confusing for folks searching for a solution to the same issue).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!